BOOK REVIEW: Trans New York by Peter Bussian

 

“It is easy for people to misunderstand and even hate an idea, a concept. It is a lot harder to hate a human being, especially if you know their story, their journey. Of course, people can still be hateful, but if they know about the struggles of their fellow humans, the chances that they will accept and love them are much higher” -Abby Chava Stein, from the Introduction.

Trans New York is a photography book giving a glimpse into the lives of transgender individuals living throughout the city, much in the style of Brandon Stanton’s Humans of New York blog.

The folks interviewed run the whole range of ages, genders, and experiences. Some people are trans, others genderfluid, nonbinary, or genderqueer in some other way. Some people say they have finished transitioning, others are still in the process. And others feel their gender is a continuous evolution with no point at which their identity is complete.

Each profile has basic information: preferred name, preferred pronouns, hometown, current age, age of transition, etc, along with three open-ended questions (paraphrased): What was your path to transition like? What makes you unique as a person? What would you like people to know about yourself that are different from typical assumptions about trans people? I have to admit these questions feel a bit limiting to me as they focus only on the person’s transness. While I understand that this is because the focus of the book is on being transgender, it would have been nice to devote some more space to finding out who these people are as individuals. What are their hobbies? Their passions and goals? What is their most beloved memory? And so on. 

The interviews do not shy away from trauma and struggles. Some people mention abuse they suffered growing up and how it has shaped them. Others describe having to advocate for themselves because they had no other resources.

Some of the photos can feel abrupt and unframed, as if the photographer just caught a quick shot of someone as they were going about their day. Since Bussian is a professional photographer with 20 years of experience, I assume this was a deliberate stylistic choice to portray the interviewees as a part of their world, rather than as models or subjects for examination. In this way, perhaps, it allows trans readers who may not know many- or any- other folks like themselves to get a glimpse of the diversity of trans lives. And perhaps cis readers too will come to a better understanding and empathy with people who are really not much different from themselves.

You can get a copy of Trans New York at Bookshop

And at Amazon

BOOK REVIEW: Transcendent: The Year's Best Transgender Speculative Fiction, edited by K. M. Szpara

 

As literature about exploring and pushing the edges of human experience, it’s not surprising that science fiction and fantasy have always featured characters who are beyond the binary of cis men and cis women.  From L. Frank Baum’s Ozma of Oz, who spent her childhood as a boy; to Virginia Woolf’s titular Orlando, who begins life as a man and wakes up one day as a woman; to the gender-cycling Gethenians of Ursula LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. 

Following in this long legacy, Transcendent is the first in a yearly series of anthologies featuring trans themes and characters.

Many of the stories are poetic and experimental, requiring a slower reading to fully absorb the atmosphere. Often a reader must simply plunge headlong into a tale, trusting that they’ll figure it out as they go, or maybe understand it better on a second reading after the piece has had a chance to sit for a while in their head. The effectiveness of this experimental storytelling method can be very subjective, and while didn’t always work for me, other readers will find more meaning in these esoteric stories.

Other stories, like Bonne Jo Stufflebeam’s Everything Beneath You, have the feel of mythology, as if they were modern translations of tales illustrated on sunbaked clay wall frescos, or in delicate inks across unfolding silk scrolls.

There are, of course, stories that fit into our more conventional notions of science fiction and fantasy. E.Catherine Tobler’s Splitskin is magical historical fiction featuring nonbinary Native characters during the American Gold Rush era. Molly Tanzer’s The Thing on the Cheerleading Squad is a modern take on Lovecraft’s gender-swapping pulp tale The Thing on the Doorstep. Margarita Tenser’s Chosen is a riff on one of the most popular fantasy tropes- you can probably guess which one. Where Monsters Dance, by A. Merc Rustad has veins of metaphor-heavy fantasy films like Labyrinth and The NeverEnding Story. 

The Need for Overwhelming Sensation by Bogi Takács is a particularly interesting story about a starship literally powered by the magic generated through the pain and pleasure of a loving BDSM relationship. 

As with any anthology, some stories did not entirely work for me. Holly Heisey’s Contents of Care Package Sent to Etsath-tachri, Formerly Ryan Andrew Curran, for example, is a short piece about a human who transitions into an alien. For me this plot hews a little too close to the “when I was a kid I identified as a velociraptor” rhetoric that transphobes use to try to delegitimize trans identities. But perhaps that’s part of the point of the story?

Transcendent is an important milestone in more direct representation of trans folks in speculative fiction. You can get a copy of this and the other books in the series from Lethe Press, from Bookshop.org, or from Amazon.

BOOK REVIEW: Queer Ducks (And Other Animals): The Nautral World of Animal Sexuality by Eliot Schrefer

 

Many people have tried to justify their homophobia by claiming that queer identities and relationships are “not natural” and don’t occur in other living creatures (witness the tired classic “Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve”). However, Queer Ducks shows that same-sex relationships are just as common in the animal kingdom as they are among humans.

The book is as much a memoir about growing up closeted as it is a book about animal sexuality. Schrefer himself knew he was gay at a young age but could not be open about his sexuality at the time. Even when he came out, he initially thought of queer behavior in animals as a dead end, but after looking through scientific articles he discovered numerous examples of same-sex behavior throughout the animal kingdom from primates, deer, insects and more.

Queer Ducks is careful to distinguish between homosexuality and heterosexuality in humans and same-sex behavior in animals. The former two terms specifically refer to human orientations and identities, while the latter is an observation of animal behavior; researchers can’t directly know what goes on in an animal’s head, after all.  The book does describe many animals as being “bisexual”- in this case referring to observed behavior where animals mate with and form close bonds with members of the same sex while still engaging in procreation with the opposite sex.  

 Male bottlenose dolphins, for example, regularly form strong, affectionate same-sex partnerships, though both will mate with female dolphins. A similar dynamic occurs with Japanese macaques, where females form strong same-sex bonds and will otherwise ignore males except for reproduction.

While Schrefer acknowledges it is hard to say if animals are transgender since humans cannot directly ask them about their mental state, Queer Ducks does talk about physically intersex animals such as “velvet-horn” deer, which have male genitalia but bodies that look more physically female. It should be noted that intersex animals are not the same biologically as hermaphrodites. Intersex animals can have a mosaic of both male and female secondary sexual traits, but they occur in groups where the majority of individuals have only one type of sex organ, such as mammals or birds. Hermaphrodites, on the other hand, are animals where each individual usually has both male and female gametes, such as slugs. Animals that change physical sex during their life- such as parrot fish- are also called hermaphrodites.

Schrefer is careful to explain that Queer Ducks is not arguing that human sexuality should be directly compared to animal sexuality. He is well aware of the long history of bigoted rhetoric equating homosexuality with bestiality. Instead, he clarifies:

 “We can no longer argue that humans are alone in their queerness, that nonheteronormative human sexualities and gender identities are unnatural because they don’t exist in the rest of the animal kingdom… Queerness is a well-established and fundamental part of nature. If queerness is ‘wrong,’ then you’d better be willing to say that the entire animal kingdom is wrong.”

Queer Ducks is humorous and snarky but also sensitive and compassionate; the author makes a segue to talk about the usage of the word “queer”, acknowledging that while it has been reclaimed by the LGBTQ+ community, there are still some people who are uncomfortable with that term, and their discomfort is legitimate. The book is also very frank about sex, but never vulgar.  There are jokes about sex, but no “dick jokes”.

You can get a copy of Queer Ducks from HarperCollins

Or through Bookshop or Amazon.