ABSTRACT
Critics such as Sandy Stone (1991) and Gayle Salamon (2010) challenged the binary framework in traditional MTF (male-to-female) trans autobiographies such as Jan Morris’s Conundrum (1974), which present transition as a linear progression between two fixed gender categories, defined largely by genitalia. Building on Stone’s and Salamon’s insights, trans literature and criticism have sought to broaden the notion of trans experience by delving into issues of nonbinary and genderqueer subjectivities, trans temporalities, and Indigenous and racialized trans lives. This chapter contributes to critical inquiries into the diversity of trans experience by examining how certain trans literary texts highlight issues of nonbinary and intersex embodiments, detransition, and nonhuman transformations to challenge the linear and genital-centric view of transition. Works such as Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues (1993), Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex (2002), Torrey Peters’s Detransition, Baby (2021), and Callum Angus’s A Natural History of Transition (2021) feature scenarios where a nonbinary person undergoes masculinizing body modification without identifying themself as male, an intersex person identifies as male and yet lets his AFAB (assigned female at birth) self fitfully inhabit their intersex body, a trans woman detransitions, a trans person undergoes multiple geological transformations, and a trans man pauses his transition to have children or becomes a monster. Together, these texts move beyond the narrow spectrum of the transfeminine/transmasculine to a broader conception of trans experiences. In particular, the more-than-human transitions in Angus’s stories highlight multifarious meanings of transition, which need not be limited to or defined by genital surgeries. In a literary world where a trans person can become a rock or a monster, transition is not a linear and fixed process, but rather a complex and multifaceted experience that can take many forms. These stories also underscore that transition involves more than self-identification and that gender is situational knowledge contingent on various social, cultural, historical, and environmental contexts.
