Staking Our Claim: Writing Trans* Characters for the 21st Century

Before I attended Staking Our Claim: Trans Women’s Literature in the 21st Century, I was unsure of what to expect. The literature I’ve encountered that addresses trans*issues has been rare, and has almost always focused on the protagonist’s transition, as if the experience of being trans* starts soon before hormone therapy and reaches its conclusion at the end of a “successful” transition. The short stories the women at Staking Our Claim read from the new anthology, The Collection: Short Fiction from the Transgender Vanguard, shattered these stereotypes of trans* literature with stories that were funny, poignant, and incredibly diverse. The event featured the writers Ryka Aoki, Red Durkin, Imogen Binnie, and Donna Ostrowsky; the four stories shared jumped from a farmer’s market in Hollywood, to a food-eating contest in the South, to a future Brooklyn, to a laboratory in 1922. And in all the stories, if any comments were made about the transitions of the trans* characters, they were never a central or pivotal point of the story.

Staking Our Claim: Trans Women’s Literature in the 21st Century from BCRW Videoson Vimeo.

Much of the discussion following the readings dealt with the very topic that was on my mind before I attended the event: what does trans* literature look like, what does it talk about, and where can it fit into a larger canon of well-written, impactful fiction? Every writer expressed their desire to create trans* characters whose lives were not just about transition, who were navigating life with trans* as just one of the identities they held. As much as memoirs—and other self-representations by trans* people—are important and still woefully rare, these authors seemed to stress a need for, and a desire to create, a different type of representation of trans* people. The authors expressed a desire to create stories that combated the unspoken notion that all literature is cis-literature unless it is a documentation of the struggles of a trans* person. Instead, the stories included a diverse cast of characters—some trans* and some not—and described an incredibly varied set of circumstances, challenges and experiences of the characters. In short, these writers showed that trans* characters can be incorporated into the plot of any story and bring a new perspective to the narrative, and that this iteration of trans* literature is one that does not fall into a strict and stereotype-based binary of trans* literature as transition memoir vs.  (cis) everything else.  It is therefore with good reason that Sarah Schulman called The Collection (available from Topside Press) a “ground-breaking anthology.”

Check out each author reading her story below.

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