The Limits of Empathy
Trans Rights and the Purpose of Fiction
By Jamie Pilon
Let’s start by painting a picture.
In 2014, I was coming of age in an era of tentative hope. Laverne Cox was featured on the cover of Time Magazine, the first person ever to do so in the publication’s history. The Transgender Tipping Point, the headline read, and that is what we came to call this era of politics. I was a teenager at the time, and I can vouch for the fact that in the early and mid-2010s, transgender people were talked about everywhere.
We were living in a period of progressive backlash against conservative efforts to curtail the rights of the marginalised. “Bathroom bills,” laws introduced to separate or ban trans people from public bathrooms, and attempts to ban trans women from women’s sports were swiftly struck down. At this time, as a political belief, transphobia was an undeniably right-wing pursuit. It was generally considered anti-feminist and easily understood to be intertwined with homophobia.
My trans community had good reason to believe that trans people were cresting the wave of social change – the United States had federally legalised same-sex marriage in 2015, as had the UK the year before. Widespread acceptance of trans people would soon follow. It may be difficult to believe today, but the societal mood around us as a social group was largely one of polite confusion and self-conscious excitement.This Brexit business was a fluke, and Hillary Clinton was going to be president.
We put a lot of faith, back then, in the power of fiction. The self-help market was booming as ever, and while those sympathetic to capital wondered why one ought to read fiction at all, we leaned on fiction’s potential to increase the reader’s capacity for empathy: You should read fiction because it allows you to understand how someone very different from you feels. The underlying assumption being, if everyone could just be a little more empathetic, then world politics wouldn’t be such a crushingly chaotic and cruel catastrophe.
It strikes me today, that this defence of fiction is flawed, not just because fiction shouldn’t need to possess any productive use to be considered worthy of existence, but because the idea underlying the empathy defence is wrong. Representation in fiction does not convert to a politics that is empathetic to marginalised people, and it cannot guarantee political change. For any trans person over the age of 20, this much is obvious: trans people have become a lightning rod for political aggression.
Let’s quickly re-paint that picture, shall we?
Across the United Kingdom and several U.S. states, it is now illegal to prescribe puberty blockers to trans kids: they will be forced to undergo the irreversible changes of a puberty they do not wish to experience.Also in the UK, under guidance from the deceptively named Equality and Human Rights Commission, trans people are not allowed to use the bathroom of their expressed gender (or, in some cases, any bathroom at all). Most trans people in the UK will spend over a third of their lives waiting for transition-related care. Some face a 224 year wait. Trans rights reporter Erin Reed keeps a map tracking legal risks for trans people in the U.S. It colours steadily darker and darker red. Out of 44 European countries, a mere 10 fully recognise gender self-identification. The Netherlands is not one of them.
The current moment has put us under a magnifying glass on a sunny day – and it’s getting hot down here. This much is clear: Increased visibility of trans people in fiction has not automatically led us in the right direction. Why? Because fiction-as-empathy-machine does not work when your position is already marginalised. Antagonistic observers do not see the value in representing the perspectives of people who aresub-human to them. Fiction that aims to show what being transgender feels like is useless in these conditions, because transgender people’s feelings are of no consequence.
Can fiction still do something for us, then? I say yes, but with a catch: It must be good fiction. And well-crafted stories with trans characters at the centre require more work: You cannot rely solely on your capacity to empathise with us, nor can you restrict your subject matter to what being transgender “feels like”. It must also understand the structures that constitute transness and transphobia.
The term gender novel (coined by Casey Plett) describes the kind of fiction about trans people that sells, meaning, “sympathetic novels about transition by people who haven’t transitioned”. In a Gender Novel, the trans character is a tortured hero, someone who has overcome violence and rejection, but eventually comes out on top, because they live their truth despite it all.
True, many trans people’s lives involve levels of violence and rejection that most cisgender people will simply never have to face. It is, in a way, not inaccurate to cast us as survivors of a hostile environment. But gender novels are often maladroit and subtly mean-spirited portrayals of transgender life. In these works, the focus is on the spectacle of transition: the destitution of gender dysphoria and parental rejection, paired with the “gory” details of sex changes and hormone replacement therapy.
What these novels fail to capture is how transness works ideologically. The graphic attempts to convey what being trans feels like prevent a more sophisticated portrayal of what being trans is like.
With Stag Dance, Torrey Peters blesses us with a far more agile portrayal of transhood. The author of the widely praised Detransition, Baby foregrounds trans characters who do not quite know they are trans(yet) in her new collection of stories and the titular novel. In particular, she focusses on the ways in which a trans woman becomes a woman in the Beauvoirian sense, before she herself completely knows she is a woman.
Though it’s not that Stag Dance isn’t interested in what it feels like to be trans or translate feelings of gender dysphoria to the reader – it expresses those things very effectively. Peters portrays transgender life before we understand ourselves, and it makes for a unique, honest, and tender portrayal. And, not unimportantly, the prose jumps off the page. Of performing the social role of a woman, the narrator of Stag Dance reveals her hesitancy thus: “I was performing something for which I’d no talent, and certainly no natural gifts, and the falseness was obvious and embarrassing, without even the thrill of perversion or menace.” A brilliant and true description of social dysphoria, because it understands not only the psychological but the socio-political dynamic of transness. Equally deft is her portrayal of bodily dysphoria, when the narrator overplucks her eyebrow: “The difference between what I had somehow hoped and the dull clay reminder of my actual self effected in me a mortal frustration, a certainty that I was not deserving of any loveliness – a hatred of my own person that as I experienced it, I knew was laughable.”
This narrator’s self-actualisation is not a linear buildup of gender affirming experiences that results in a catharsis of gender euphoria plus the eventual coming out; it is a rollercoaster of fear and the “certainty” that she will never be beautiful. She is locked into a hyper-masculine environment and constantly reminded of how her desires are unbecoming of her. Stag Dance takes place at an illegal logging site. The lumberjacks organise a dance, where the jacks who’d like to be approached as “womanfolk” pin a triangle of brown fabric to their crotch, called “the bush”. Our narrator is famous across the logging industry for her large stature and significant physical strength, and highly respected because of those masculine signifiers. When she confirms her decision to wear the bush, one of her colleagues voices: “My point is – you don’t take off that triangle, the stories’ll change. You’re not a fellow to just blend into the timber. You’re used to being accorded a measure of respect – hell, awe! You keep up that triangle, it won’t matter how many mules you did or didn’t hoist”. Functionally, it’s a warning: admission of transfemininity is considered an abandonment of the superior sex, and that abandonment will have consequences.
“Admission of transfemininity is considered an abandonment of the superior sex, and that abandonment will have consequences.”
For an equally adept portrayal, we may turn to “The Chaser”, where our narrator treats his lover Robbie as a girl – that is, as someone who is sexually disposable – long before she is widely recognised as one. Robbie tells our narrator “Trust me … I always want to be the girl,” which seems a straightforward confession. Yet, the narrator wonders what Robbie meant, “to be the girl just in terms of sexual positions – or more generally”. Central in “The Chaser” is the conflict between the narrator’s (straightforwardly heterosexual) desire to be with Robbie, and the instinct that openness about this desire will be met with social ostracization. Despite everyone at the boarding school recognising Robbie’s femininity, confirming their relationship to the outside world continues to be too risky. Associating with a transfeminine person is considered a blot on the narrator’s social status. Not because dating trans women is gay, but because dating a trans woman means confirming her womanhood.
Peters fully exposes the nasty trick of transmisogyny: you can degrade a trans woman as a woman, so long as you only degrade her as a woman. This is how transness becomes both punishable and the punishment: to stray from one’s gender assignment is deplorable, and deplorable people are implicated to stray from their gender assignment. The text has a solid understanding of what it means to be a trans woman, structurally: the social environment oscillates between recognising her femininity and tearing it away from her – whichever is most degrading in the moment – in order to maximise social ostracization.
To be clear, I’m under no illusion that Peters’ book would be any more convincing to the ideology I spoke of earlier (where trans people’s feelings are not worth considering by virtue of their transness), than say, Middlesex. However, because Peters articulates the social and political reality that lies at the heart of transness, she can also produce a vastly superior recounting of what being trans feels like emotionally. It remains my contention that writing trans characters with such discernment is not the sole domain of trans people.
It is tempting to relegate Peters’ skill to her own status as a trans woman. Certainly, when a writer may access the emotional truth of transness with relative ease, it tends to make for better writing of trans characters. But it requires a deepened understanding of how transness functions, contemporarily and historically, to write the way she does. Well-crafted stories about trans life should betray a command of transfeminist theory, and a coherent ideological view of what transness means at the individual and the political level. This takes a concerted effort from any writer, whether they be cis or trans.
The problem with empathy is that it runs out. If your support for trans people is founded on your ability to identity with our feelings, then I’m screwed. Because you don’t really know how I feel. I need you to accept that, and I want you to think and write about trans people with more than your imagination. I want you to think and write about trans people with your knowledge.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jamie Pilon (they/them) is a writer and aspiring Wikipedia editor with a BA in English Language and Culture. Online is their favourite place and they’re still learning how to enjoy being in the real world. They don’t know what they want to be when they grow up yet.
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