The Coming of Age of Transgender Literature: Reassessing Genre, Gender and Themes in Contemporary Fiction

My project analyses contemporary trans literature's move from life writing to fiction. Over the past decade, trans representation has reached a tipping point, prompting a coming of age for trans literature. Three questions guide my research:
1. What new literary genres and styles are deployed by trans authors?
2. How and why has gender representation in fiction changed in comparison to life writing?
3. What other interpretative avenues have trans authors adopted to narrate their experiences?
I selected five novels as primary corpus: Jordy Rosenberg's Confessions of the Fox (2018), Alison Rumfitt's Tell Me I'm Worthless (2021), Torrey Peters' Detransition, Baby (2021), and Akwaeke Emezi's Freshwater (2018) and The Death of Vivek Oji (2020). Rosenberg resorts to historical fiction to exhume the lives of trans people. He revisits the story of 18th-century thief Jack Sheppard, characterising him as a trans boy. Rumfitt adopts the Gothic novel to highlight an affinity between 1980s radical feminists and today's gender criticals. The departure from life writing has sparked two changes. Firstly, de-binarised representations of gender. Peters challenges hegemonic gender theories. Confronted by the prospect of fatherhood after his detransition, Ames' character demonstrates how the wrong body trope is not sufficient to portray the variety of trans experiences. Emezi intertwines transness with ogbanje spirituality. Surgeries become a tool not only for affirming gender, but also for transcending human limitations. Secondly, the adoption of new narrative devices allows trans authors to broaden their storytelling. Apart from gender medicalisation, trans authors address politics, queer parenthood, and the intersections between race and gender. The plasticity of literary genres thus represents the fluidity of trans experience, shifting the thematic focus from trans identity - as something fixed and prescriptive - to trans life as a process that is not limited to fixed categories.