A community of writers are expressing themselves for one another – and the medium they’re using is poetry, in which it’s ‘easier to say things that haven’t been put into words before’
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.
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