The Guardian Looks 'Beyond Cliches' at Trans Poetry

At the Guardian, Cat Fitzpatrick looks at how and why trans artists are finding their voices through the medium of poetry. More:

For a long time, trans writing meant memoir. From Christine Jorgensen to Janet Mock, the most celebrated trans writers (or more to the point, the only ones who could get published) were those prepared to tell the story of their “transformations” in apparently truthful ways for consumption by a largely cisgender audience.

Big and even medium-sized publishers are still most comfortable putting their money behind true-life stories about “sex change”. But if you dig a little bit deeper, a revolution is happening. It began, perhaps, with the anthologies The Collection: Short Fiction from the Trangender Vanguard and Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics in 2012 and 2013, and has been gathering pace since.

Publishers like Biyuti, Transgenre and Topside (where I work), and magazines like Them, Vetch and Zine of the Trans Poets Workshop are putting out a steady stream of works by trans writers which (unlike I Am Cait or Transparent) are being avidly consumed by trans audiences. They represent a wide and vibrant movement of representation which is not just of us, or even just by us, but for us.

These works go beyond the cliched trans narrative which cisgender network executives and publishers have decided that “general audiences” want. As a result, they have much more to say, not just to trans people, but to everyone. They tell richer and stranger stories, ask deeper questions about gender, identity and injustice, and are written with the kind of brio, inventiveness and excitement that comes from desperately needing to say the things they are finally finding a way to write down.

And a lot of them, maybe most of them, are poetry. This year, for the first time, the Lambda Literary awards will recognize trans poetry as a distinct category. They will have a serious field to choose from. [...]

Continue at the Guardian.