Trans Figured - Sophie Grace Chappell

I once worked on a musical play about sex-education whose final song was titled “When The Thinking Has To Stop”. I sometimes feel that way about this period of trans history – can we just get on with living, please? Can we apply our considerable minds and imagination to simply contributing to society? But it seems not – there is an incessant requirement to produce reasons and rationalizations and arguments for our continuing to be. And if that is the case we might as well have the best thinking on our side. Onto the stage then steps Sophie Grace Chappell, - professor, editor, philosopher and poet, and not incidentally a transgender person – with her book, “Trans Figured – On Being a Transgender Person in a Cisgender World”. Sophie has much to say, about herself and trans in general, all of it marinated in thinking and argument and although she’s not the first trans person to give an account of themselves and offer some responses to critics – Alok Vaid Menon does much the same in a short book and CN Lester in a more developed text – we can always benefit from more support. In fact it seems to be a key part of the current experience of being trans to be answering questions. Sophie brings a highly developed sense of ideas to her task which is at bottom to reconcile who she is with what the world is. Logic is marshalled, false reasoning exposed, definitions queried and refined, analogies offered and justified. Along the way a number of good questions are examined, – is consciousness gendered? the distinctions between sex and gender, male and female, masculine and feminine, what it is to be a woman, - and often elaborately thought-out answers given. Her own story emerges amongst the argumentation, and it is in many ways one of the classic trans stories – a youth of confusion, refusal and denial, an early middle of awkward accommodation, a late middle of final acceptance and transition, and the looking around and forward which comes with later life and the writing of a book. It’s not a rough working-class life-story, but nor is it an upbringing rife with privilege. Jesus or rather God is in there and that’s not something many trans-memoirists can offer but Christianity merges into the cloud of thought, knowing and unknowing, without sounding too churchy. For all of which, many thanks. Back, though, to my original question – is it time for the thinking, the figuring out, about trans to stop, for a while at least? A lot of negative assertions about trans are quoted and addressed, but who is saying these things, and who is the book for? A very simple answer is that it is for trans-exclusionary academics and for anyone caught up in educational processes, - for the first as answers to their assertions and for the second as a solid grounding in what trans is about. No doubt Sophie’s students are recommended to read this text, and anybody who is likely to get into an argument with an opinionated other could follow suit. What you do get from all this is a sense of difficulty, in reconciling a personal and individual trans story with the noisy and divisive world of media and name-calling. Also a tension about the irrationality of many of the anti-trans arguments. How to argue rationally with irrationals? And inevitably one of the key targets of all this thinking and answering is the loose cohort of trans-exclusionary “thinkers” who have claimed such a prominence in recent times, - the most prominent being surely J K Rowling to whom Sophie dedicates a whole section of the book in the form of an open letter. It’s a well-written response and many will find it a useful read on its own, because it is clearly-directed rather than abstractly so. Truth be told a lot of TERF’s are academics and have time and tenure to cook up their arguments, so Sophie entering the field with her arguments is welcome. The book’s weaknesses don’t reduce this usefulness but for the sake of conveying a fair sense of the book I should mention that all that thinking through does make for a very laborious read at times, that the book’s structure is spelt out at the end instead of an index but seems a very convoluted journey, that it has failed to find a way of conveying on paper long internet links for references, that the emphasis is, as so often, on the MTF experience, and that the shifts of literary gear from memoir to bullet-pointed catalogues of assertions, to poetry to a late bout of science-fiction do tend to wrong-foot the reader. In a way it is attempting to be all things to all people, to address trans from all angles. A bit more focus would have made the literary progress more relateable. And from a personal point of view I would raise a number of questions. How does queer fit into Sophie’s picture of the trans world? And are we really now living in a “cisgender world” in the same way as we did before cisgender became a thing? Aren’t the new emphases on non-binary and gender-fluidity opening up the arguments, and isn’t even the most ignorant and biased media coverage now conducted within a language which we our(trans)selves engendered? Isn’t the world of cisgender, in all of its hegemonies and hierarchies and social-philosophical strictures and structures being challenged and modified by us? And isn’t the road to success and acceptance for us the way of celebration and feeling, emotional energy? If the thinking has to stop it is so that we can dedicate ourselves to joyously and uniquely being.