Author and artist Magdalene Visaggio’s work, including her comics series Kim & Kim, has earned her Eisner and GLAAD Award nominations. Girlmode, illustrated by Paulina Ganucheau, marks the creator’s second foray in the children’s space, following The Ojja-Wojja. Sisters Mel and Teghan Hammond are making their debut with their YA collaboration Lucy, Uncensored. Visaggio and the Hammonds spoke about writing about navigating girlhood, their shared experiences of online hate, and the importance of portraying trans girls for young people today.
Mel Hammond: Hi Mags! It’s really nice to chat with you. Teghan and I are stoked to read Girlmode. It’s so exciting to see more trans girl protagonists in the YA world!
Teghan Hammond: I totally agree! When I was growing up, I saw almost no representation of trans people like me. I think it’s very exciting to be able to do better for the trans kids growing up now.
Magdalene Visaggio: Hi, Mel and Teghan! I’m jazzed about Lucy, Uncensored myself! Growing up in the ’90s, the only places I could see other girls like me was on Jerry Springer. I’m thrilled and terribly, terribly jealous that kids today don’t have to go through that. What a difference a few decades makes!
Teghan: Oh gosh. I didn’t watch Jerry Springer. My first exposure was Family Guy. But I can imagine they had similar vibes. I think my first real time seeing trans joy was when I went to Seattle. That was my first Pride ever, and Seattle that year had a specific Trans Pride Day prior to the march. I suddenly had community around me, accepting and uplifting me as a baby trans person. Lucy, Uncensored is a lot about finding community and your place in the world, which I agree seems a lot easier today than a decade ago when I came out.
Mel: So, Teghan and I are sisters, and we co-wrote Lucy together to help connect and cope during a super tough time in our lives. (I’ll let Teghan tell that story.) We wanted Lucy, Uncensored to be a book full of trans joy and trans pride—one that focuses on life after coming out. Lucy does face transphobia, but at its core, the book is about a beautiful friendship between Lucy and her best friend, Callie, who get into all sorts of ridiculous adventures together. We had a lot of fun living vicariously through the characters, who are loosely inspired by us.
Visaggio: That’s adorable and I love it. I’ve kinda been all over the place on how I want to portray trans lives in my work; my earliest stuff treated it as incidental, which was deliberate because I was very focused on transness not being my—or my characters’—sole defining trait, but there was really no avoiding the impact it would have. So, in my indie comics series Kim & Kim, much of Kim Q’s drama with her father surrounds his resentment of her transition, for example.
Eventually I got scared off writing trans characters entirely for a hot second there, because I got a lot of people telling me I was a diversity hire with no other interests, and I didn’t want to be pigeonholed. Over time, I’ve returned to embracing it, especially as I’ve gotten deeper into a post-transition life and started reading fiction by other trans writers. But I still don’t want to just be writing trans tragedies or coming out stories, i.e. the only stories they ever let us tell. So, I started Girlmode with the idea that Phoebe is a girl, first and foremost, and that I’d be foregrounding the commonalities between cis and trans girls without either sacrificing her transness or treating it as something ancillary to her. Instead, it was about the part of transition we never get to see: sorting out the competing, contradictory demands placed on women and girls that we’re so rarely given the space to navigate. There’s something powerful about the moment when you realize you’re being objectified and commodified and sexualized before you can even see that in yourself.
Teghan: I appreciate how well you articulated that, because I felt the same way while writing Lucy. Mel and I started writing together when I was incarcerated in a men’s prison, a few years into my transition. I would handwrite pages and mail them to Mel, a mix of chapters and personal notes about how I related to the scene in my own life. She would type them up and send me her own chapters from Callie’s perspective through the prison’s annoying email system. It had a word limit, so the chapters would be broken across numerous letters that would show up out of order days apart. Writing was a way for Mel and me to stay connected, and for me to share my experience of coming out. Our first iteration of Lucy was a coming out story, and it kinda didn’t go anywhere. We took a break from writing, in which time I took a college course in prison on creative writing. When Mel and I started back up, we were both ready for a fresh new story—not just a coming out story, but a story about friendship and belonging and how hard those things can be for trans people to find. I think to be able to write this new, better, version of Lucy, I really needed to be further into my transition, more to a place of loving myself and feeling the deep connection I have with Mel and our family.
Mel: I’m honored that Teghan was willing to co-write Lucy with me during such a tough time in her life. (She’s home now, by the way, and we’re excited to celebrate the book launch together!)
Teghan and I are proud to put this book into the world, though we’re pretty scared about the huge spike in LGBTQ+ book bans and challenges over the past few years. I was actually the target of a transphobic, right-wing hate campaign against a nonfiction book I wrote a few years ago, A Smart Girl’s Guide: Body Image, which (gasp!) acknowledges the existence of trans kids. The Daily Mail published photos of me, and I received all sorts of disgusting hate mail and threats. It was incredibly scary. But my big hope is that Lucy, Uncensored gets into the hands of the trans teens who most need to read it!
Visaggio: Oh, God, me too. I was targeted by a massive harassment campaign in 2017–2019, for the same sort of thing. It’s a brutal experience to endure, and can absolutely leave lasting damage; I’m not really able to use social media anymore as a result of the trauma from that. It’s absurd to me how much they hate us.
Mel: Thanks for being so open about your experience, Mags. Congrats again on Girlmode!
Teghan: Yes, thank you so much. It is so refreshing to talk to another trans author.
Lucy, Uncensored by Mel Hammond and Teghan Hammond. Knopf, $19.99 Oct. 8 ISBN 978-0-593-81405-5
Girlmode by Magdalene Visaggio, illus. by Paulina Ganucheau. HarperCollins, $18.99 Oct. 15 ISBN 978-0-06-306065-4
