Topside Press was founded in Brooklyn in 2011 with the intention of publishing literature by, for, and about transgender people. Topside recently went on the Never Mind the Hormones tour, which sought to “bring the vanguard of trans writing in North America with their European counterparts.” The press release for the tour describes the “revolution in trans literature” of the past few years, which is both “a central part of the accelerating political change around trans issues and an important literary development in its own right.” Two writers published by the press, Imogen Binnie and Casey Plett, read alongside a rotating selection of writers, creating the largest series of trans writers reading together to date, and providing a platform for conversation, community and creativity across Ireland and the UK.

Topside were in Dublin on November 17th and 18th, performing at UCD and Tenterhooks gigspace in Newmarket Square. Tenterhooks was packed out on the evening, which was hosted by co-founder and poetry editor of the press, Cat Fitzpatrick, who began the readings with a poem, performed with the participation of three audience members. Fitzpatrick afterwards spoke about the role of a press that publishes literature that not only has trans people as subjects, but also as authors and audiences, and how this affects various transgender narratives. One of the problems with fiction published by cisgender (aka non-transgender) authors about trans characters, is that the narratives become about the fantasies of cis writers and cis readers. The prevalent genre of such narratives is what Fitzpatrick terms the transition memoir, which is essentially an exercise in titillation and speculation, a gratuitous and ultimately harmful fantasy of what it might be like to transition for someone who has never had such an experience. On the other hand, the writing of literature that has transgender people as its author and intended audience, as well as its protagonist, creates what Fitzpatrick terms “an extension of possibility and reality” for trans readers, and she believes that such literature has the potential to “change lives.”  Fitzpatrick cautions not to underestimate the power of seeing a humanising representation of oneself, or the repercussions that a lack of such representations can have.

Imogen Binnie read from her book Nevada, which follows twenty-nine year old Maria as she leaves her job, girlfriend, and life in New York, to embark on a trip of self-discovery across the US. Maria’s dark humor, introspective internal monologuing, and cynical punk attitude excellently conveys her experience as a queer trans woman in New York: “Eventually you can’t help but figure out that, while gender is a construct, so is a traffic light, and if you ignore either of them, you get hit by cars.” Nevada has been credited with inspiring the current flow of trans writing. Casey Plett cites her as an influence on her debut collection of twelve short stories, A Safe Girl to Love (2014), winner of a Lambda literary award, which follows twelve young trans women navigating family, work, sex, and friendship. The writing of both features queer characters, which also contributes to deconstructing cisnormative and heteronormative assumptions about the relationship between gender, sex, and sexuality. In terms of her influences, Binnie mentions Kathy Acker (“The first time I read Kathy Acker changed my life”), Denis Cooper (“Whoa this dude is so far disappeared into his own thing, and he’s just committed to it. That really affected me.”), and Sybil Lamb (“who changed everything for me, in pretty serious ways”) who is also published by Topside.

When asked about the role of the printed book, when so much publishing takes place online, Plett replies that “I don’t think a lot has actually changed that much – I mean I work in a bookstore and lots of people still want to buy books”. She thinks that as a platform for self-expression and publishing creative work, the internet “Is great – I feel like both of us cut a lot of our teeth reading and writing stuff that was being published online. A lot of the trans women were publishing online, and that was really formative and important, and wouldn’t have happened without the internet.” Binnie also retains faith in the printed book: “I have this idea for something I want to create, and I think, will this work best as a poem, as a song, as a short YouTube video… there are, like, so many media that you can do things in, and I think that books have really specific strengths.” One of the strengths Binnie sees in books is their “static nature”: “you know, Nevada came out like two-and-a-half years ago, and people keep discovering it, but it keeps on being the same book, and so somebody who read it two-and-a-half years ago can talk to someone who read it today.” This isn’t the case with the internet, because “you’ve got the timeline, and stuff falls to the bottom”, but when publishing on the internet you get “that immediate feedback. I definitely appreciate that.” A public reading like the Never Mind the Hormones tour gig in Tenterhooks creates another kind of space, which Binnie describes as “like a conversation, the text in conversation with other people who are in the room” and when she reads her work, she focuses on “how to make people want to pay attention. It definitely feels like a performance, in a way that can feel like human connection.” Plett’s favourite thing about reading her work, is that  “there are a few lines in my book which like I never thought were funny, that everyone always laughs at every time, and I’m like ‘That’s not funny, but okay, awesome!’”

Nevada and A Safe Girl to Love both clearly fall outside of the kind of fiction that Fitzpatrick speaks of, written by non-transgender authors about transgender characters. With regards to writing an experience that is not one’s own, Plett sees a difference between, “writing characters who have something about them that is an oppressive experience that you don’t have, versus trying to write about that particular kind of oppressive experience”, that she thinks tends to get confused. Binnie frames this similarly, in terms of her own experience as an author: “I do think about it too, in terms of ‘am I writing about people who experience this, or am I speaking for people who experience this thing,’ and feeling like it’s pretty fucked up to be like, ‘I’m going to speak for this group that doesn’t share my oppression.’ Whereas writing about someone who has an oppression that you don’t share feels super possible to me.” Plett wrote a blog post for The Walrus called Rise of the Gender Novel, about cis authors who write books about trans characters, citing four such books as the basis for her critique: For Today I Am a Boy (Kim Fu) , Moving Forward Sideways Like a Crab (Shani Mootoo), Middlesex (Jeffrey Eugenides), and Annabel (Kathleen Winter). Despite the arguably good intentions of the authors, Plett points out in her article that “they often rehash stale, demeaning tropes: a coy mix-and-match of pronouns; descriptions of trans women as fake and mannish; the equation of gender with genitalia and surgery; a fixation on rare intersex conditions that allow for tacked-on, unrealistic transition narratives.” Her blog highlights how such writers often overlook “transgender life as it is actually lived”, failing to write characters for whom “being trans is just one aspect of their whole, holistic beings”.

As Binnie puts it, “Cis people writing about what it is like to transition, is often what would it be like if I, a cis person, decided to transition. But it’s like, you’re a cis person so you’re not going to transition, so therefore that thought experiment takes you to wrong places.” Plett agrees: “When it comes to fiction I think it does kind of get tricky sometimes, because you can’t sort of insert that identity in there, and expect it to have no bearing […] So I’m not saying that it’s a completely easy thing, but there are very obvious missteps as well, that people make.” Binnie raises another point about cis authors writing about trans experiences: “it’s like no, back off, you do have to do the work, in order to write about someone who has this experience. But that doesn’t mean you can’t do it, it just means that actually pay attention to what these people are saying about their own experiences instead of just making up what it would be like for you with this different experience, an experience that you don’t have.” Binnie raises the issue of consent and representation, so often worryingly absent from depictions of transgender characters in books and other media which don’t consult the lived realities of the those they pertain to represent, raising again the issue of such writing which plays to the cis imagination and normative stereotypes.

Even if such books have the ostensibly good intention to educate and inform cis readers, by doing so they recentre a cisgendered position in both the production and consumption of such writing, which is not the authentic representation that Topside aims for. Despite the recent surge of trans visibility in popular culture and mainstream media, the experience of those whose gender identity falls outside of hegemonic paradigms is contextualized by hostile social attitudes, a lack of legal recognition, discrimination, violence and transphobia, which as Plett’s blog post points out, warrants more than a simplistic or uplifting transition narrative, and a neat ending. In fact, both Nevada and the stories in A Safe Girl to Love are characterized by ambivalent, ambiguous, and open endings. As Fitzpatrick, Binnie, and Plett illuminate, authentic representation has to be done on its own terms, hence self-publishing by an independent press like Topside is the most effective way of producing such literature. They also show how literature about trans characters has to ultimately be also by and for transgender people, in order to resist normative assumptions and provide humanising representations in their place.