This is a follow-up post to the Writer’s Guild of Alberta’s “Controversy @ Noon” discussion on transgender writers in Canada, where I was honored to be a panelist. There were lots of thoughts I had that kept popping up during the discussion and in the time following, so I wanted to summarize in a blog post for anyone interested.
On a few different levels, I was always kind of baffled that I got invited to speak here; I felt vastly underqualified as a writer, and as a trans person. The latter is based on an observation that most trans people inhabit their chosen gender identity with strong conviction, like they chose their identity because it’s what they want. I contrarily have always felt trans simply because I could not be cis, that something about being cis was corrosive for my identity. It did take some persuasion to convince me that I was a good fit for this panel. I was just hoping that I could offer some perspective that perhaps isn’t typical of trans voices.
Writing as a trans person is easy for me. Writing as a trans person is just an extension of the way I’ve always written, which is as a provocateur. No matter what I’m writing about, I’ve always appreciated the value of shocking, baffling, confusing – even scaring people. Doing this in a meaningful, captivating way is much more difficult than people give it credit for, but succeeding at it is extraordinarily powerful if you want to truly reach for and change your audience. And being trans is provocative – whether needlessly or not. No matter what I do as a trans person, even if I just approach a barista to order a drink, I will be met with raised eyebrows and slight grimaces; I feel then that embodying provocation through my art is to reclaim this cultural disdain I receive as a source of power. And it is such a reliable source of power that even if I just want to change minds about Derrida or de Beauvoir, I will evoke “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” because for one reason or another, it works.
Working as a trans person is very different and somewhat strange. At this point and moving forward, I can really only speak about gender intersected with race, as I very much find my trans identity and Vietnamese-Canadian one spliced. Speaking broadly but not lightly, Vietnamese culture is intolerant of trans people. In many ways though, I think being Vietnamese has predisposed me to being trans. There is a well-known cultural phenomenon where Asian men are emasculated and desexualized while Asian women are hypersexualized and etherealized. So in the ways which were important to me, moving from a man to a woman granted me a lot of power. Asian men are also simply physiologically more effeminate; I have a naturally leaner, smaller body, I can’t grow facial hair, etc. I write about this in a short story which I presently have big ambitions for.
I was born Hien Van Nguyen. Olivia Van Guinn was conceived as something between an authorial pseudonym and a drag persona – a means of reclaiming power. It is highly salient to me that Hien Van Nguyen, the men’s name, is also the more obviously Asian one, while Olivia Van Guinn – which retains my middle name in attempts to offset the softness of my last name – does a lot to evoke whiteness. I often find when I write about race, it’s more appropriate to publish as Hien Nguyen, but that also means publishing as a cis man. A poem I published with the /temz/ review, Asian Boys Who Look Like Swans, is published by Olivia Van Nguyen; this was an early career move before I considered the importance of name recognition. And I have considered publishing under two names as some authors do, but then I couldn’t forgive the sin of having a bibliography for Asians and a separate bibliography for everyone else. I don’t have answers to this dilemma right now.
Censorship is a big deal right now, and it is harder to publish more provocative works than simpler works with wide appeal. Bigotry now is a lot more insidious than it used to be, because while bigotry ten years ago could be characterized best with slurs and outright attacks, bigotry now is best characterized by lack. I think about what opportunities and privileges would have been offered to me if I were a white, cis man, and because there’s no way to know for sure, the oppressors are getting away with it more often. Now, a solution might be for publishers to read blind – obscure gender and race until an acceptance is made. But I don’t think this will work. On the “broad appeal” topics – the Western world has gotten very, very, very good at writing about rivers. Generation after generation has grown and learned recklessly and freely how to write on rivers, and any writing about rivers today is a marvel of literary engineering for that reason. And meanwhile, there is no blueprint for how to write about bottom surgery; anyone who tries to needs to invent the wheels themselves. That’s why I perceive that in a blind writing field, trans writers are still disadvantaged. However, if publishers accept the risks of publishing risky trans works, I have verified that there is a market for it.
At the panel, we ran out of time before we got to talk about advice for new trans writers who don’t know where to start. My simple answer is just to do it; write for yourself and to your heart’s content. I do have a more constructive answer as well. I think new trans writers face lots of pressure to represent the trans community wholly and accurately. This results from a mainstream idea that the trans community is monolithic, and it is not unintentionally a means of quieting trans voices that take more effort to understand. So I advise new trans writers not to write about the trans experience, but to write about your experience; in the early stages, this alleviates a lot of the paralysis which comes with writing for others. No cis person worries about correctly representing the cis experience.