The Transgender Memoir

This post is about the genre of the transgender memoir and Kai Cheng Thom’s Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars.

In the many essays and articles I have read for my project, the topic of the “transgender memoir” has come up multiple times. Sandy Stone went in depth about the first handful of memoirs written by transgender people that were almost fiction in the way they created such definitive separations between their lives as one gender and their complete transformation after gender confirmation surgery. These stories made the concept of being transgender palatable to people who had never considered that someone could feel their identity did not align with their gender assigned at birth. The purpose of these memoirs was to introduce this concept while still assuring the wider public that gender was still directly tied to genitalia as they had always been taught. In these memoirs, someone would be a man with the traits that are traditionally considered to be male, and the second they woke up from surgery they were a woman with all of the stereotypical characteristics that are attributed to women.

This kind of dramatization and almost fictional retelling of the trans experience was common to trans stories released to the public for quite some time. This is part of what makes Kai Cheng Thom’s magical realist memoir Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl’s Confabulous Memoir so remarkable. I have just started reading it, but it is clear that this book also uses elements of fiction to tell Thom’s story of coming out as trans and running away to start her new life. The major difference is that it does not make the process of transition seem as simple as surgery. It is a continuous process and one that is not tied to what your body looks like. Hormones and surgery are discussed as a possible part of the story, and parts of many other’s transition, but it is not the only aspect. In addition to telling her own story, she includes the stories of many other trans women, and it does not gloss over the trauma and danger that are a part of many trans people’s lives. This story is so incredible because it tells the story of transition much more honestly than it has been traditionally, it uses fiction to add drama and show the real emotion that can be hard to get across in a traditional memoir. This book is also significant because it is aimed at young adults, giving trans kids an example of someone like them that is honest and difficult, but also fabulous and badass in a way that has never been done before.