Pen World Voices: Towards a Trans Aesthetic
With the pandemonious shit going on with the government, making trans voices a priority feels right in this moment.
Last week was Pen America’s annual Pen World Voices festival, and one of the events that resonated with me for days after was called Towards a Trans Aesthetic. I prioritized it over a few other tantalizing options; the same time slot on the festival schedule contained a screening of “The Art of Exile” (co-presented by by Artists at Risk Connection (ARC) & City of Asylum) and a panel called After The Fall: Post-Apocalyptic Novels (Pol Guasch, author of Napalm In The Heart, Fernanda Trias author of Pink Slime, and Jeff VanderMeer, author of Absolution.) The big draw was to hear Jennifer Finney Boylan in conversation, who has been the president of Pen America since 2023, a trans writer, professor and LGBTQ activist.
Jennifer Finney Boylan is an obvious choice for president of an organization that champions the freedom of writers, freedom of press, human rights and expression, once you strike the fact that institutions are slow to put outsiders (or I’d love to use Kate Bornstein’s term “Outlaws”) in top roles. Her books have been banned from some Texas libraries (She’s Not There), the state of Tennessee (Mad Honey), and the U.S. Naval Academy (Good Boy: My Life in Seven Dogs). I had the privilege of listening to her on the intimate panel featuring five trans writers who discussed the issues on everyone’s minds: she and Kate Bornstein, Oliver Radclyffe, Bishakh Som, Meredith Talusan.
(Though she needs no introduction,) Kate Bornstein is a big deal considered an early gender-non-conforming person who transitioned, but doesn’t call herself a woman necessarily (pronouns she/her and they/them). She famously says, “I’m not a man, and I’m not a woman.” During the panel, author Meredith Talusan credited Kate’s huge contribution to the options available as excavated in her 1994 Gender Outlaws, which Kate now says has fallen lightyears behind the conversation where trans people are today, which is all she could hope for. In the opening to followup Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation, an essay collection everyone mistypes as the next “Genderation,” myself included, she take the opportunity to highlight more and new nonbinary voices. She uses the word “epigenetics” in a chat conversation formatted into an intro with her coeditor S. Bear Bergman, “where evolution of a species is proved to have noticeably jumped in just one generation.” Reviews elucidating the thinking in Gender Outlaws TNG and Meredith Talusan’s book Fairest, a memoir on growing up with albinism and sex/gender outlawism from the Philippines to Harvard will be forthcoming from your devoted reporter. (Watch this space).
Bishakh Som, author of the graphic novel Apsara Engine, credited a different Kate for helping her find her witchy femme side: Kate Bush (to roars of applause, just kidding, in an intimate introverted setting it was more like a hum of approving spiritual auras). Oliver Radclyffe is a British trans writer whose memoir Frighten the Horses is described as “coming of age in the fourth decade of one’s life,” as someone who transitioned late. A memorable moment from the Q+A involved addressing, per an audience member’s question, the atmosphere in the UK and the efforts of one terrible woman, She Who Shall Not Be Named, to lead a dehumanizing campaign. There was a certain togetherness in the space as Jenny’s automatic response to the question was expelling “Expecto Patronum” into her mic. From my notes, which I may have misinterpreted due to vagueness and shotty memory, I believe Oliver quippily identified himself as “gender irrelevant,” and pardon to everyone if I’m attributing that to the wrong poet. Everyone onstage was witty and the worldplay was fire.
Meredith Talusan took the hard question on everyone’s minds to “what do we do now” with an insightful response from having lived under the Marcos in authoritarian Philippines. She draw attention to posts online these days serving as guides to hide under the radar, mostly for academics, teachers, people who want to maintain their important roles doing important jobs without being discarded, and the (admirable) effort toward clinging on to the places where differences can be made; but, as we’re all probably quick to understand, “As soon as we do those things,” to fly under the radar and remain unseen, “we become part of the authoritarian regime,” i.e., we give them what they want. For academics, teachers, activists to be hidden from sight and relegated to the underground.
Kate Bornstein sketched out her outlaw theory of 4Dimensional Gender. Paraphrasing from my sparse notes, she says that the binary of male and female, as we can easily understand, is two dimensional. Then we say “no” to two only, add the heart and the mind, and come to have three dimensions. The 3D is a sphere. Then, realizing that gender has a time, and a space, we give it spacetime, and it becomes a continuum. She says that when you embrace all the options, “you can’t be misgendered,” which is something I’m working my way around to even as a cis woman. With short (and sometimes no) hair, I’ve had positive experiences of people asking my pronouns, not wanting to assume “she.” I also had a time I was called a boy and didn’t enjoy it so much. More frankly naval-gazy reflections on my own gender to come, which I think are exactly what this kind of forum hopes to invite.
Jennifer Finney Boylan, whose book Cleavage was described by Kate as the best book they’ve ever read, says she is working now on writing that is fueled by rage, feeling reckless, uncontrolled — and everyone on the panel is looking forward to reading this “Angry Jenny” who doesn’t want to be “careful.” At a previous book event, she said, “I’m not begging for your love anymore. I simply expect it.” Over drinks on Greenwich Ave that night at a hard-won patio table under a perfect Manhattan twilight sky, I tried to verbalize to my partner why trans women like Jenny Finney Boylan, (who quipped she now identifies as “Madam President”) mean so much to me. I get a sense she values femininity more than I ever will, more than I had ever had to, and fights more for femininity, for women, to be a woman. It’s like Malala Yousafzai fighting for an education I took for granted and never treasured. I skipped school, daydreamed lessons away, and played Gameboy under my desk.
The room and the panel had an energy of embrace for this next-level fierce powerful Jenny that encapsulates the idea that there can only be freedom for any of us if there is freedom for all of us. That means fighting for women who want to be women, just as trans women, by being who they are in public express the pride and power of womanhood for all of our benefit.
At the event, I was provoked to think about gender, I think with a new insistence, I think because though I’ve read and even copyedited books by trans writers, this might be the first event I’ve been to — as far as I can recall — for trans writers. Held in the The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center on West 13th, it was a gay and trans crowd, and wanting to be close to my hero, I felt a bit like a privileged cis white woman getting a front row spot — and with an amazing new undercut and a fabulous 100% cotton dress that just came in the mail. In other words, feeling deeply self aware, which led me to think super critically about my role. Ally, fan, supporter — and what comes next? Whose book do I buy? What do I post on socials? How can I, a relatively platformless being, albeit with an amazing undercut and sharp penmanship, give to this world of writers whose humanity is being threatened and undermined in the present moment? What do I say? And what do I think about gender? And does it matter?
When Kate Bornstein said in 1994 talking about Gender Outlaw, she was always saying, “I’m not a man, and I’m not a woman,” or “I don’t feel like I’m a man, and I don’t feel like I’m a woman,” I felt compelled to ask myself, do I feel like I’m not a woman and I’m not a man? It’s worth asking to get to the answer, Yes, I feel like I’m a woman. No, I don’t feel like a man — but do I feel like a boy, or a guy? Sure, on Bornstein’s space-time continuum of gender, in certain times and places I feel like a boy, have felt like a boy. I always said there’s a Twitter algorithm to guess gender, because you don’t give Twitter your gender on signup — my boyfriend wrote that algorithm when he worked on the Twitter ads team for targeted ads — Yep, my boyfriend is the guy who worked out the algorithm to tell advertisers which gender bucket to put you in to target you for football ads or mascara. I always said the algorithm would guess male for me.
On socials, from 2008 or so, I looked like a boy. All posts about science fiction and fantasy, Doctor Who and LOTR. I was one of a small percentage of WOW girls no one believed were actual chicks playing World of Warcraft. I would get on our server and converse over mic with guild members who would be like, “Oh, you’re an actual girl,” upon hearing my voice, and I’d match female characters in the robes of priestesses and mages to male voices and be like, “What? You’re a guy.” I’m always with the boys, happier with nerds, more comfortable in male groups, with guy friends, one of the guys.
So when my short haircut became a buzzcut and with a baseball cap I was thrice misgendered as a boy, I was curious why it bothered me one of those times, and curious why the other two didn’t. How our feelings around gender shift, how an “okay Boomer” type interaction provokes frustration but a genuine question or a mistake in a quick moment don’t — and being wounded, unexpectedly opened to small hurt, a tiny glimpse of feelings I’ve read about. To name a few books, A/S/L by Jeanne Thornton features three kids grown into womanhood like myself and my online MMO friends who uncover that they’ve all transitioned since their days in kinda sorta really misogynistic chat rooms, where one of the three called herself a girl, Lillith, without anyone suspecting. In Naomi Kanakia’s The Default World, her hero/antihero character Jhanvi is constantly hoping to get by unnoticed, for it to be taken for granted that she is a woman — something that I take for granted, and for a tiny slice of time I couldn’t.
Does understanding stemming from reading hold as much water as personal experience? Do we need a combination to be capable of empathy? As an empath myself, I have to say no, and also as a lifelong bookworm. Being part of a physical space with present actual humans might be a desirable ingredient for the mix, so I encourage not only reading trans writers as a priority but searching out author events, book clubs, LGBT events, etc., including for cis/straight/ally folk. Reminding ourselves these words on the page, like the images and videos in feelgood social posts, come from the hearts and brains of human beings who need our unyieling protection right now. Meredith Talusan signed the book of hers I bought “to a more just and joyful world, ” the joyful future we want to make, and that’s a good place to be thinking toward.
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