ABSTRACT
Life writing has proved an invaluable medium for writers and scholars to theorize trans identity and personhood. Arguably, the field of transgender studies began with scholarly attention to trans authored life writing in Sandy Stone’s “The Empire Strikes Back” (1991). Stone’s essay spurred a scholarly conversation around the construction of self and identity in trans life writing that lasts into the present. Following Stone’s foundational work scholars including Jay Prosser, Sarah Ray Rondot, and Aren Z. Aizura have considered transgender life writing. As rich as the contributions offered by these scholars have been, the conversation has been largely constrained to the relatively narrow temporal and generic window of transgender autobiography. This focus considerably shortens the history of trans self-narration and reduces the complexity and diversity of trans self-narration. I correct this narrow scope by offering a survey of transgender life writing beginning with the sexological case histories of Havelock Ellis followed by modernist experiments such Jennie June’s Autobiography of an Androgyne (1918) and The Female Impersonators (1922) as well as Lili Elbe’s Man into Woman (2020). Following this, I consider mid-twentieth century explorations of trans identity offered in community-published magazines such as Transvestia. In the wake of the transgender autobiography’s massive influence, I trace the ways trans writers critically engage with the form through experiments in auto-theory and autofiction. Writers including Susan Stryker, Paul Preciado, and Mckenzie Wark mix life writing and critical theory to both critique dominant forms of transgender life writing and to explicitly retheorize trans identity. Influenced by critiques of the trans memoir, novelists including Kai Cheng Thom and Sibyl Lamb explore dimensions of trans life often left unsaid in more mainstream accounts. By widening the scope of texts considered from transgender autobiography to transgender self-narration more broadly, I complicate existing understandings of trans life writing as a conservative, disempowering genre. The history of transgender literary self-representation is much richer than the history of the trans autobiography. Attention to sexological case studies, pre-transsexual autobiographies, popular and community-run periodicals, auto-theory, autofiction, and digital writing exemplify the diversity of trans literature of the self. Exploring these genres provide a more accurate understanding of how trans people have historically understood themselves and provides the basis for a literary tradition much stranger and more radical than a more manicured autobiographical tradition would allow.
