After years on the sidelines, whether as comic relief, menacing villains, or tragic figures, trans and nonbinary characters in fiction have begun to get their long-overdue close-ups. Recent high-profile releases include the collection Stag Dance (Random House) from Detransition, Baby author Torrey Peters, and Woodworking, journalist Emily St. James’s debut. PW spoke with authors whose forthcoming works depict trans and nonbinary characters in all their complexity.
Layered Meanings
In A.E. Osworth’s Awakened (Grand Central, Apr.), which PW’s review called “a story of trans magic, empowerment, and joy,” a coven of trans witches square off against a malevolent AI entity. Osworth, though, has a friendlier relationship with artificial intelligence: they used what they say is “a really janky AI called Botnik Voicebox” to create Hex, the AI villain. The human characters, meanwhile, were generated by tarot spreads, which the author says felt “the same as writing with AI—making meaning from something that inherently doesn’t have any.”
Representation is relative, says Osworth, a lecturer at the University of British Columbia’s School of Creative Writing and the author of 2021’s Gamergate-inspired We Are Watching Eliza Bright. “I won’t find a character that’s exactly like me, but I can find some of my representation in a lot of different characters,” they say. “My goal is more complex than making one person stand in for a community; I want the community to be represented as many different people.”
Andrew Joseph White, author of a trio of well-received YA horror novels, makes his adult debut with You Weren’t Meant to Be Human (Saga, Sept.), in which an alien invasion of worms and flies demands subservience from human survivors in exchange for their safety. One such human, a mute, autistic trans man named Crane, gets pregnant by a handsome ex-Marine, and the alien hive forces him to carry the pregnancy.
“It’s about the intersection of transgender and autistic identity, and what happens when queer and disabled people crack under the weight of society. The genre is just as important, if not more so, than the representation itself,” White says, explaining why horror is his preferred lens. “If I really want to be seen, the book has to look terrible things directly in the eye. I adore every book written by and about queer, trans, and disabled people, but it isn’t until I find a story that makes my guts turn that I can finally go, aha. That feels right.”
The protagonist of When the Harvest Comes (Random House, Apr.), a femme professional violinist named Davis, gets derailed by news of the death of his estranged Baptist minister father, which he receives at his wedding reception. He avoids the funeral and, in the ensuing months, reckons with childhood trauma and disconnects from Everett, his spouse. Debut author and Electric Literature editor-in-chief Denne Michele Norris “excels at plumbing her characters’ emotional depths as Davis and Everett observe each other from an increasing distance, and the melancholic narrative builds to a satisfying crescendo,” according to PW’s starred review.
“I wanted to write a love story where a marginalized person is in this beautiful loving relationship, and is still able to mess it up,” Norris explains. “They’re operating like every other fucked-up person who’s running around not making the best choices.”
Authors are finding that representation can work in service of the plot, rather than the other way around. “I’m craving stories where identities are relevant, but not the story itself,” says Lee Lai, an Australian cartoonist living in Canada. She follows her 2021 Lambda-winning debut, Stone Fruit, with Cannon (Drawn & Quarterly, Sept.), which examines the relationship between two queer Chinese friends—one's a writer and the other works in a restaurant kitchen—and “all the ways in which identity-based friendships can wear thin,” Lai says. “It questions relevance, especially for queers in their 30s, when pressing things are coming up other than identity exploration.”
This shift in focus, for the characters and for Lai, is born of an evolving cultural narrative. “I’m no longer everyone’s first trans person,” she says. “My identity is no longer the first thing people notice about me, which is really cool. I just want to get into my characters’ emotional lives, introduce different stressors and see what happens.”
Only human
Nicola Dinan follows her 2023 debut, the queer love story Bellies, with Disappoint Me (Dial, May), a “striking work,” PW’s starred review said, that establishes Dinan as “an invaluable voice in contemporary fiction.” Max, a 30-year-old trans woman, falls down the stairs at a party and wakes up with an unsettling determination: she wants to find a boyfriend more than she wants to focus on her career. Setting out on what Dinan calls an “unfeminist journey” to find a guy as soon as she can, she chooses Vincent, a cisgender man.
The story draws on “struggles I’ve observed in the women around me from all walks of life, especially as they enter their 30s,” Dinan says. “In their 20s they were promised the world, and now see that those promises were a folly, and that the expectations still exist—the pressure to have a family, to hear the barrage of voices telling you you’re living the wrong kind of life.” Readers of all genders and ages have reached out to her about the book, which pubbed in the U.K. in January. Those readers appreciate complexity, Dinan says; making characters too likable makes them inhuman, and authors do their characters a disservice by making them infallible just because they’re trans.
It’s also a disservice to expect characters to stand in for an entire community, says debut author Max Delsohn. “What I love about this moment for trans lit is that there’s a lot more space for each trans writer, myself included, to write based on their own experience. We’re not a monolith.” Delsohn’s short story collection, Crawl (Graywolf, Oct.), takes place in Seattle, a city he expected to be a “queer utopia” when he arrived there for college but which turned out, like his characters’ lives, to be more complicated. Each story’s protagonist is “somewhere on the transmasculine spectrum” and all except one is in their 20s.
Mason Deaver’s The Build-a-Boyfriend Project (Avon, Aug.) also centers on a 20-something—Eli, a trans man stuck in a dead-end assistant job at a magazine and smarting from the end of his longest relationship. His friends send him on a disastrous blind date with Peter, who approaches him afterward to confess his inexperience and ask for help in becoming a decent boyfriend. Eli spots a possible breakout story, and their “fauxmance” eventually blossoms into something real.
This is Deaver’s first foray into adult romance, after four YA novels that all featured trans and nonbinary characters. They say they’ve seen real progress in trans representation, whereas when they were growing up, “the best-case scenario was that the trans person was a side character; usually it was forced outings, tragic endings.” Now, as an author themself, they’re able to write characters who share more than their gender identity. “As much as I relate to Eli’s experience as a trans person in America, I relate more to Peter, coming from a small Southern town of 2,000 people,” Deaver says. “We both knew we were queer as teenagers, but didn’t have people we could trust.”
Lambda–winning novelist Isaac Fellman returns with Notes from a Regicide (Tor, Apr.), which PW’s starred review called “prescient, nuanced, and remarkably well told.” A thousand years in the future, Griffon Keming, a trans journalist in New York City, is mourning the deaths of his adoptive parents, a trans art couple who took him in when he ran away from an abusive home as a teen. He finds his father’s journal and encounters his parents’ painful past as refugees and failed revolutionaries. The author, who works at the Digital Transgender Archive, says the book explores “how well we can love each other without knowing each other very well.”
In seeking out any kind of representation as a young trans person, Fellman found mostly subtext (a lesbian couple from the popular manga Sailor Moon being called “cousins” with a wink and a nudge) and one-dimensional queers behaving badly. He and other authors PW spoke with agree that things are changing for the better. “You no longer have a single author being asked to speak for the whole community, which opens up what kind of stories can be told,” Fellman says. “You can portray people in their full humanity, and be interested in other parts of the story. A trans character today does not have to be emblematic of anything. They can just be a character.”
Correction: This article has been updated to clarify the occupations of the characters in Cannon.
Liz Scheier is a writer, editor, and product strategist living in Washington, D.C. She is the author of the memoir Never Simple.
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