28 - Whiteness and Trans Genre, Whiteness as Trans Genre

Summary

What makes a text generically trans? A central plank of the term ‘transgender’ and prefixial ‘trans’ was a genre shift. After the modernist and transsexual fixation on autobiography and medical case studies, trans writing was meant to play on a far more open semiotic field. Whether that transformation took place, however, is a matter of debate. If ‘trans’ as the denotive for a genre of writing remains vague and not very well distinguished from its cousin ‘queer,’ and so trans still generates few genres beyond the first person, perhaps the issue is not the narratological genealogy of trans, but an unspoken racial haunting of the very same, a presence that is unspoken even as it is explicitly conjured and exorcised. This chapter investigates three recent works of trans genre—Torrey Peters’s Detransition, Baby, Jordy Rosenberg’s Confessions of the Fox, and T. Fleischmann’s Time is the Thing A Body Moves Through—to propose an undisclosed inter-racial relation that trans conventionally serves to cover over. The foundational relation of trans genre may prove to be the white trans author to the trans woman of color, she who occupies the text through either absence or idealization.