![]() ![]() ![]() I’ve tried to do this with Trans: A Memoir, and these are some of the books that have inspired me. But most of these works drew on personal experiences, and in a time when autobiographical writing is in fashion, with many writers explicitly using their own lives in novels, such works can serve a useful purpose in bringing trans politics, history and culture to a wider audience in an accessible way. ![]() They aimed to organise a community and stimulate discussion within it, and the memoir – seen as written for the benefit of outsiders – became less popular. Opening some fascinating possibilities, it suggested that trans writers consider themselves “as a genre – a set of embodied texts whose potential for productive disruption … has yet to be explored”.Ī range of theoretical texts followed, which sought to give a language to trans and genderqueer identities, self-defined rather than imposed. Artist/activist Sandy Stone brought these concerns into The Empire Strikes Back: A Post-Transsexual Manifesto, which circulated in early online communities. They also spoke out both against gender identity clinics which told service users to keep their histories secret and transphobia within second-wave feminism. By the late 1980s, authors were questioning the conventions of these memoirs, in particular how they represented the space between “male” and “female”– or failed to. ![]()
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