For long I was thinking of this topic... for quite a long time something's pushing me to write about it and bring this genre to light. Although is not a genre per se, but more of the topic of a novel. Today I'd like to introduce you to trans literature, books written by transgender authors or, mostly, books that talk about transgender issues and stories. Our contemporary community is still very closed-minded about sexuality. According to my free and universal spirit, I feel it in my guts, it shouldn't be that way. No one should critisize another's personal choices of any kind, more to it, no creature should be excluded from any aspect of social life just because of their sexuality. Especially when it comes to books and writing. Books are our way to knowledge, to deeper understanding of the world and its mysteries, the behavior of others around us. Knowing each other's issues, creates a stronger community and enhances love! On this, we should invest to grow and heal ourselves and our planet. Open up your eyes, your spirit and help expand the love!
Firstly, I'm going to give you some information about the so-called "first" book talking about transgenderism. "An Anglo-American Alliance" is a novel, written and illustrated in 1906 by Gregory Casparian (1856–1942). Little is known about him. A Turkish-Armenian, Casparian served as an officer in the Turkish army. He emigrated to the United States in 1877, settled in New York and worked as an artist, painter, and photoengraver. The Anglo-American Alliance is his only published work.
More of the plot:
The novel is set in the future of 1960 and depicts a world that is geopolitically broadly similar to that of 1906, with the US and the UK as the world's major colonial powers. Casparian stated in the preface that the purpose of the book was to show the desirability of a world government, to which he saw the establishment of an Anglo-American federation as a first step. There are limited technological advances, such as prenatal sex discernment, suspended animation and a cure for laziness. Telescopes have shown intelligent life on other planets, which is described in interludes unconnected to the rest of the novel.
The novel follows the romance of two young upper-class women, the Briton Aurora Cunningham and the American Margaret MacDonald, who attend the same ladies' seminary in Cornwall and pursue a secret romantic relationship. After graduation, Margaret has herself surgically transformed into a man, Spencer Hamilton. As a famous musician, Hamilton courts and marries Aurora, and they live happily ever after.
Reviewing the novel in 1990, Everett F. Bleiler described it as a curiosity and as an "eccentric novel with an early description of surgical sex changes". A 2011 article in io9 highlighted the work's novelty in that it presented a lesbian romantic relationship directly rather than through the subtext of a "Boston marriage", as was occasionally done in Victorian fiction, and in featuring science fiction's first transgender hero.
The next book I'll tell you about is "Beatrice the Sixteenth: Being the Personal Narrative of Mary Hatherley, M.B., Explorer and Geographer" is a 1909 feministutopian novel by the English transgender lawyer and writer Irene Clyde, about a time traveller who discovers a lost world, which contains a postgender society. Such an interesting book, though not at all famous... I'm bringing it out for you... It's a science-fiction novel, very curious and peculiar and though it talks about a tribe with slaves, we should not be judgemental, as it was written in 1909. Today, we know better... Apart from that, it's a generally open-minded novel where we should be amazed by the fiction that Irene's mind created, especially for 1909 (maybe..)!
The protagonist Mary Hatherley, M.B., an explorer and geographer, travels through the desert somewhere in Asia Minor. A kick from a camel sends her into another plane of existence,[2] which seems to exist in a time before Christ.
Mary is rescued by a group of fair, clean-shaven people wearing robes and escorted back to their kingdom, known as Armeria. It is a slave-owning monarchy ruled over by Queen Beatrice the Sixteenth. The Armerians live in luxurious palaces and fight with darts, javelins and swords; despite their fighting abilities, the natives are familiar with both agriculture and government.
There are two classes of people, free and slave; slaves can apply to change households if they wish. They follow a strict vegetarian diet, having ceased to slaughter animals for over a thousand years. Life partnerships are known as a "conjux" and divorce is unknown; relationships appear to be based on love and companionship, rather than sex. The Armerians are unable to reproduce, so infants are purchased from a neighbouring tribe.
The Armerian language is a combination of Latin and Greek, which Mary is familiar with and contains no gendered nouns. Mary is soon able to understand and communicate with them and is drawn to Ilex, one of the leading figures in the kingdom.
Mary uncovers a plot to dethrone Queen Beatrice in favor of the queen of Uras, a neighbouring kingdom. This results in the dismissal of the perpetrators and a war with the kingdom of Uras, in which Mary aids the people of Armerias and they eventually win.
After the war, Mary is offered a way to return home by the court astrologer, but decides to remain and form a conjux with Ilex. Mary uses the astrologer's help to send a manuscript to a friend in Scotland in our world, who arranges for it to be published by Irene Clyde.
Beatrice the Sixteenth has been described as a successful example of defamiliarization, in that it places the reader in a world initially without any indications of gender and this places strain on the reader's attempt to apply existing social paradigms which require gender categorisation.
The novel has been cited as a predecessor of other feminist utopias and modern radical feminist thinking on gender and sexuality. Some commentators draw attention to how the novel initially avoids the use of gendered pronouns, instead referring to characters as a "figure", "person" or "personage", yet as the novel progresses, gendered pronouns such as "she" are increasingly used and feminine characteristics are blatantly valued. Others, such as Sonja Tiernan, argue that despite Armeria being presented as genderless, the characters all appear to be female. Emily Hamer calls the book a lesbian love story. The author's deliberate avoidance of gendering the book's characters has been contrasted to Ursula K. Leguin's 1969 novel "The Left Hand of Darkness", which uses masculine pronouns to refer to its genderless characters. It has also been compared to Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "Herland", published six years later, in 1915, with Beatrice the Sixteenth described as being "more radical".
The novel sold badly and copies were still held by the publisher in the 1950s. It was described as "well written, interesting and its characters are more than mere puppets" by one reviewer. Another argued that the "Adventures of Mary Hatherley" would have been a better title, but praised the vegetarianism of the Armerians. A review in the Herald of the Cross interpreted the book as having a spiritual and occult message, stating that the author "means it to represent the Soul's experience upon an occult plane of consciousness". Louise Radford Wells described the novel as a "quite unusual story" and was initially confused by the sex of the characters, until realising that "every heroine is also a hero"; she ended her review stating that the book "is very well written and proves entertaining".
We need to see more of the author's life to understand why I included this novel in this article!
Thomas Baty (8 February 1869 – 9 February 1954), also known by the name Irene Clyde, was an English transgender lawyer and expert on international law who spent much of his career working for the Imperial Japanese government. He published "Beatrice the Sixteenth", a 1909 utopian science fiction novel, set in a postgender society. He also co-edited "Urania", a privately printed feminist gender studies journal, alongside Eva Gore-Booth, Esther Roper, Dorothy Cornish, and Jessey Wade.
Baty was born in Stanwix, Cumberland, England, to a middle-class family. At school, he was a very gifted student and he was given a scholarship to study at The Queen's College, Oxford. He entered that establishment in 1888, and got his bachelor's degree in Jurisprudence in 1892. In June 1901 he received the degree of LL.M. from Trinity College, Cambridge. He got his D.C.L. from Oxford in 1901 and his LL.D. from Cambridge in 1903. His expertise was in the field of international law. He taught law at Nottingham, Oxford, London and Liverpool Universities. At that time, he became a prolific writer on international law.
Following the outbreak of the First World War, Baty took part in the establishment of the Hugo Grotius Society, established in London in 1915. As one of the original members of that society, Baty got to know Isaburo Yoshida, Second Secretary of the Japanese Embassy in London and an international law scholar from the graduate school of the Tokyo Imperial University. The Japanese government was searching at that time a foreign legal adviser following the death of Henry Willard Denison, a US citizen who served in that position until his death in 1914. Baty applied for that position in February 1915. The Japanese government accepted his application, and he came to Tokyo in May 1916 to start his work. In 1920, he was awarded the Order of the Sacred Treasure, third class, for his service as a legal adviser. He renewed his working contracts with the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs several times, until in 1928 he became a permanent employee of that ministry. In 1936, he was awarded the Order of the Sacred Treasure, second class.
During his work for the Japanese government, Baty developed the notion that China was not worthy of recognition as a state under international law, a view that was later used to justify invasion of China.
In 1927, he was part of the Japanese delegation to the Geneva Naval Conference on disarmament. This was his only public appearance as legal adviser to the Japanese government, as the rest of his work involved mainly writing legal opinions. In 1932, following the Japanese invasion of north China and the formation of Manchukuo, Baty defended the Japanese position in the League of Nations and called to accept the new state to league membership. He also wrote legal opinions in defense of the Japanese invasion of China in 1937.
In July 1941, the Japanese government froze the assets of foreigners residing in Japan or any of its colonial possessions in retaliation for the same move against Japanese assets in the US, but Baty was exempt from this due to his service for the Japanese government. Baty decided to remain in Japan even following the outbreak of war between that country and the British Empire in December 1941. He rejected the efforts by the British Embassy to repatriate him back to his country, and kept working for the Japanese government even during the war. He defended the Japanese policy of conquest as a remedy to western colonialism in Asia. In late 1944, he questioned the legitimacy of the pro-Allied governments established following the end of the German occupation in Belgium and France.
Following the Japanese surrender in 1945, the British Ministry of Foreign Affairs was considering indicting Baty for treason, but the Central Liaison Office (a British government agency operating in Japan) provided an opinion stating that Baty's involvement with the Japanese government during the war was insignificant. In addition, some legal advisers within the British government shielded Baty from possible prosecution on the grounds that he was too old to stand trial. Instead, the British government decided to revoke Baty's British nationality and leave him in Japan. He died in Ichinomiya, Chiba, Japan, on 9 February 1954.
Baty never married. Some evidence suggests that he hated sex, as he was disillusioned with Victorian sexual norms and disgusted by the then accepted notions of male domination over women. He described himself as a radical feminist and a pacifist.
In 1916, along with Esther Roper and Eva Gore-Booth, Baty, using the name Irene Clyde, founded "Urania", a privately circulated journal which expressed his pioneering views on gender and sexuality, opposing the "insistent differentiation" of people into a binary of two genders. Baty lived out the gender non-conforming principles promoted by Urania, and for this reason is sometimes remembered as non-binary, transgender or as a trans woman when discussed in connection with Urania. He also wrote under the name Theta.
An important person in his life was his sister, who went with him to Japan in 1916, and lived with him until her death in 1944.
Baty was a strict vegetarian since the age of 19; he was later Vice-President of the British Vegetarian Society.
Because of the amount of information given for these two books, I will continue writing about trans literature in another article. The parts that will follow on the subject will be more radical every time!
Thank you for reading, I hope it helped in expanding love and let those books and their authors not be forgotten!
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