Nina Kiriki Hoffman’s sequence of novels A Red Heart of Memories (1999), Past the Size of Dreaming (2001), and A Stir of Bones (2003) may be of interest to this site’s readers for one major transgendered character, who is onstage in Past the Size of Dreaming and A Stir of Bones and appears in flashbacks in in A Red Heart of Memories. Several other characters are more or less atypical in their gender identity and presentation. Hoffman has also written a number of short stories about the characters from these books, some but not all of which are in her short story collection Permeable Borders.
A Red Heart of Memories begins with the meeting of two homeless people. Matt (Matilda) Black is better off than the average homeless person because of her magical talent, which is to converse with the spirits of man-made objects. She can, for instance, talk to trash cans and dumpsters and ask them if they have any unspoiled food that would be safe for her to scavenge, and ask unoccupied houses if they wouldn’t mind unlocking for her and letting her spend the night when it’s cold out. She can use her talent to repair appliances and cars, and could theoretically settle down and get a steady job of that kind — but she has such a deep-seated wanderlust that she can’t stand to hold a job and live in one place for very long, and she gets along better with “inanimate” objects than with people. She also has a kind of passive telepathic ability, to see people’s mental images.
Edmund Reynolds is a witch; he talks to things as well, but mostly to the spirits of natural things, animals and trees and rocks. He follows Spirit, going here and there and trying to make things better through judicious use of magic — cleaning up the pollution in a lake, for instance. When Matt meets him, he’s just finished repairing a crumbling wall in a pioneer cemetery by dint of merging with it for several months. He wants to help her, and she’s distrustful at first, saying she doesn’t need help. But after she talks to his car and learns more about him, she lets her guard down, and they become friends.
Edmund has been wandering for years; there’s a period of time in his life, between his teenage years when he first gained his power, and his adult years as a wanderer, that he can’t remember. Some kind of trauma is blocking him from remembering why he left his hometown and became this wanderer. After meeting Matt, he decides to visit his hometown for the first time in about fifteen years and start tracking down his childhood circle of friends, partly to see if they can help him remember.
This quest to find Edmund’s friends and recover his lost memories, and then to deal with the consequences of that, fills A Red Heart of Memories and Past the Size of Dreaming. The first book ends with fairly good closure, Edmund having found two of his lost friends and recovered his lost memories; but there are two other friends to track down, and Past the Size of Dreaming begins shortly after the end of the first book as Matt and Edmund start looking for them. One of them is the transgendered character I mentioned above. It’s hard to talk about their character arc much without spoilers; even telling you in advance that one of the characters is transgendered is a kind of spoiler. Their transition is offstage, in backstory; we never learn all the details, but there are a couple of interesting conversations where they talk about their change and the reasons for it with the friends they haven’t seen in fifteen years.
A Stir of Bones is a prequel, set about twenty years before the other two, when Edmund and his friends are about thirteen. It’s from the point of view of Susan, one of the viewpoint characters of A Red Heart of Memories, and shows how she met Edmund and the others and how they helped her through a severe crisis. It stands alone well, but I think one would appreciate it more having read the others first. Sometimes I re-read the books in publication order and sometimes in internal chronological order. I think you could read either A Red Heart of Memories or A Stir of Bones first, but you should definitely read A Red Heart of Memories before Past the Size of Dreaming. A Stir of Bones was published as YA, while the others were published as adult novels, but I think all of them would appeal to the same readers.
Hoffman writes beautifully, and her characters are wonderfully real, complex and sympathetic. The personalities of the things that Matt talks to, and her conversations with them, are charming and often funny without being played for laughs. The way magic is presented in these books is another marvel; Matt’s magic works very differently from Edmund’s, and each is different in turn from several other forms of magic used by other characters. And though it’s not a thoroughly worked out “magic system,” of the kind some fantasy writers treat like an alternate system of physics, it still makes emotional sense; all the different forms of magic feel like part of the same coherent world.
I love these books to pieces and I re-read them every few years. I’ve just finished re-reading the novels, and I’m reading (in some cases re-reading) the stories in Permeable Borders now; Hoffman is not quite as good at short stories as at novels, I think, but they’re very good too.
A few of Hoffman’s other works have involved transgender elements. The Thread that Binds the Bones (1993), her first novel, has an important transgender transformation subplot, and the short story “Unleashed” in her earlier collection Time Travelers, Ghosts and Other Visitors is about a woman cursed to transform into a man on the night of the full moon. (The promisingly titled Body Switchers from Outer Space (1996) is a fun read, but only involves one same-sex body swap if I recall correctly.) I’ll probably review The Thread that Binds the Bones here whenever I re-read it next.
When Wasps Make Honey, the sequel to Wine Can't be Pressed into Grapes, is now available from Smashwords in EPUB format and Amazon in Kindle format. See here for more information.
Planetary Brigade by Keith Giffen, J.M. DeMatteis, and various artists is a superhero comic, published in two miniseries in the mid-2000s. It's about a superhero team, mostly a Justice League analogue (there are obvious analogues to Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and Green Arrow, while other characters are not such obvious analogues of DC or Marvel characters). It's mostly funny, with some serious bits. (Giffen and DeMatteis are best known for their comedic run on Justice League International in the 1980s-90s.)
I mention it here because one of the main characters is trans. I'll give some details about them after availability information and some spoiler space.
The 2007 trade paperback Planetary Brigade is out of print, but used copies are available on abebooks and Amazon and probably other comics-specific sites. Both miniseries were also reprinted, along with the various related Hero Squared miniseries, in the Hero Squared Omnibus (just released a couple of weeks ago from Boom! Studios).
More about the trans character after spoiler space:
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Purring Pussycat appears fairly shallow in the first two-issue miniseries; she seems to be in the hero business for the money and sex. The second miniseries reveals her backstory and continues her story after the first series. She's a reformed supervillain and a trans woman. She was rescued from an abusive father by the supervillain Mister Master, who helped her transition and develop her powers, and treated her as his daughter. When she realized Mister Master was going off the rails (to the extent he was on the rails to begin with), she defected to the heroes and served with them for some years (including the adventure shown in the first miniseries) before they found out she was trans. Some of them (the Superman and Batman analogues) reacted badly, and they pressured the others into throwing her out of the Brigade. She went back to Mister Master for a while before returning to the Planetary Brigade when Mister Master was betrayed by another villain he had allied with.
I'm somewhat ambivalent about the portrayal of Purring Pussycat. I mostly like her portrayal in the second miniseries, but I'm annoyed by the way she appears in the first miniseries; it would be bad to portray the only female character that way, but since she's one of at least three female characters with diverse personalities, it's less annoying. It becomes more so when you realize she's the only trans character. But she's definitely better than most portrayals of trans characters by older cis male authors.
Dragon Princess by S. Andrew Swann (DAW, 2014) is a comedic fantasy novel with a transgender body-shuffle plot. Frank Blackthorne, a thief, is on the run from the government of one country, and flees to the neighboring country, where he’s recruited by a wizard to kill a dragon and save the princess he’s kidnapped. He objects that he’s a thief, not a hero, and the wizard responds by giving him an ancient sword with enchantments designed for killing dragons.
He finds the dragon’s lair easily enough, but learns too late that the dragon and wizard are colluding to defraud the kingdom and are using him as a patsy. The wizard’s spell goes wrong when Frank interrupts it, and he winds up in the princess’s body miles away from the dragon’s lair. He naturally assumes that the princess is somewhere in his body, but things turn out to be more complicated: a four-way body shuffle, not a simple swap.
The plot is complex with a lot of twists and turns, and some clever subversions of fantasy tropes. The characterization isn’t as good as the plot, but Frank and Princess Lucille both have interesting character arcs, and there are several other enjoyable minor characters. The transgender element is frequently played for laughs, but also taken reasonably seriously; Frank’s gradual and imperfect adjustment to his female body, and Princess Lucille’s gradual adjustment to her dragon body, are important parts of their character arcs (but not the only thing they’ve got going on characterization-wise). There’s no sex, but Frank in the princess’s body is threatened with rape a couple of times — by comedically incompetent antagonists, so there’s not much feeling of real danger. I won’t give away the ending, whether they get their own bodies back or not; I will say the ending is surprising, clever, and logical.
As for the humor, it’s generally situational humor and witty dialogue and narration, not wordplay. It’s nowhere near Terry Pratchett’s level, but better than a lot of other comic fantasy I’ve read.
Four of my novels and one short fiction collection are available from Smashwords in ePub format and from Amazon in Kindle format. Smashwords pays its authors better than Amazon.
The Dragonsword trilogy by Gael Baudino consists of Dragonsword, Duel of Dragons, and Dragon Death. I first looked into it because I’d heard of its having strong TG elements, and though the covers were unpromising, looking like fairly generic high fantasy, I was pleasantly surprised to find it much better and more original than I expected. The secondary world that the main characters from our world visit is suspiciously derivative and similar to certain times and places in our world’s past, but there turns out to be good metafictional and in-world reasons for that; and the apparently cliched “visitors from our world must fulfil their destiny by helping the sympathetic locals fight the unsympathetic foreigners led by a dark lord” plot turns out not to be at all what it appears.
I won’t say too much about the overall plot arc beyond that to avoid spoilers, but I’ll say more about the TG subplot. One of the cultures involved in the main conflict in the first book is extremely sexist, subordinating women more than many historical Earth cultures; another is more egalitarian than most Earth cultures at a similar level of technology where men’s physical strength was a more important advantage than in our technological age. The chief wizard of the less-sexist culture decides he can demoralize the enemy and minimize loss of life by transforming their most prestigious warriors into women. This doesn’t work out as planned — I won’t say everything that goes wrong with it to avoid spoilers, but for one thing, the transformed women aren’t as permanently demoralized as their enemies expect. Largely due to the influence and support of the main protagonist, a warrior-woman who’s an immigrant from our world, they reinvent themselves as warrior-women and remain formidable opponents.
The transformed women are important but not viewpoint characters in the first book, and their transformation happens offstage. But in the second and third books, several of them become more major characters, and three of them are viewpoint characters; their character arcs are among the best parts of these books. The ways they react and adapt to the change is all over the map; some adopt a female gender identity quickly, some slowly, some hardly at all; some kill themselves because they can’t take it; some become lesbian, some heterosexual women, some asexual.
I’d recommend these. They’re out of print, but cheap used copies are readily available from various online retailers. I plan to read more of Ms. Baudino’s work at some point, though I don’t know that any others have TG elements.
The Constantine Affliction by T. Aaron Payton (Night Shade Books, 2012) is a steampunk detective story, set in an alternate London where a sexually transmitted disease has recently begun spreading, killing many and changing the sex of the survivors. This is central to the plot, but not in the way that it would be in a story that’s solidly in the TG fiction subgenre; none of the viewpoint characters are transformed, though a couple of major supporting characters were transformed in the backstory, and one other is transformed in the course of the story, though not onstage.
The story begins with Adam, Victor Frankenstein’s monster himself, attempting to revive the reasonably fresh corpse of a murdered woman. It’s one more failed experiment of many, a mindless zombie instead of the rational creature he’s been hoping for.
Then Pembroke “Pimm” Halliday, a sort of alcoholic Lord Peter Wimsey, is hired — or rather blackmailed — by a master criminal, Abel Value, who wants him to figure out who has been murdering his low-class human prostitutes and dumping their bodies on the doorsteps of his high-class clockwork-woman bordellos. Meanwhile, Eleanor Skyler, a female journalist who writes under the gender-ambiguous byline of E. Skye, is investigating the clockwork bordellos, and stumbles on a secret more dangerous than the mere scandal she was looking for.
Pimm and Skye meet, of course, and continue their investigations together; and of course the murder of the prostitutes turns out to be connected with Adam’s researches, the “Constantine Affliction,” political intrigue and treason. The story as a whole is fast-paced and great fun, and a fair bit deeper, philosophically and poetically, than one expects from a fast-moving adventure story, though not as deep as many of the author’s short stories.
From the point of view of gender, the most interesting aspect of the book is the supporting character of Freddy, or Winnie — Winifred Halliday, née Frederick, Pimm’s long-time best friend and for some years now his wife. The law doesn’t recognize transformations, primarily to protect stability of inheritances; so Winnie is still legally male and, if her original identity were generally known, her and Pimm’s marriage would be annulled and there’d be a terrible scandal with both their families (Freddy’s family thinks she ran off to America after her transformation). Winnie has adapted to her transformation better than most victims of the Affliction, many of whom are trying to disguise themselves as male to prevent anyone from finding out about their change, or have locked themselves away and interact with the world only through servants. But she’s still attracted to women, and her nominal marriage to Pimm is a convenient arrangement for both of them, to give her more respectability and freedom than she’d have living in her parents' house, and to get his parents to stop trying to arrange a marriage for him. She’s an inventor, though she modestly calls herself a mere tinkerer — she supplies Pimm with spiffy period-appropriate James Bond-gear. (Some heroes carry a sword-cane; Pimm has a taser-cane.) She’s tough, smart, funny, feminine without being girly — probably the best thing about this book; if I have any complaint it’s that she doesn’t have a larger role and some viewpoint scenes. But it makes sense that she’s a supporting character; she’s already come to terms with the big upheaval in her life, and she doesn’t change in the course of the story nearly as much as Pimm, Skye or Adam.
T. Aaron Payton is a pen name of Tim Pratt, who writes the most amazing short stories under his own name, and novels under several different pen names for various genres. This is the first of his novels I’ve read, but it won’t be the last.
The novel is subtitled “A Pimm and Skye Adventure,” implying possible further books about these characters, but since Night Shade Books went out of business shortly after publishing the first, I fear the odds of that are slim. Copies of this one still seem to be readily available both used and new, though.
Three of my novels and one short fiction collection are available from Smashwords in ePub format and from Amazon in Kindle format.
Wine Can't be Pressed into Grapes | Smashwords | Amazon |
When Wasps Make Honey | Smashwords | Amazon |
A Notional Treason | Smashwords | Amazon |
The Weight of Silence and Other Stories | Smashwords | Amazon |
One of the main characters in The Drowning Girl by Caitlin R. Kiernan, the viewpoint character's girlfriend, is a male-to-female transsexual. This is a minor spoiler, as the reader doesn't find out she's TS until several pages after she's introduced (but still fairly early in the book). The story as a whole is fantastical, or seems so (it's published as fantasy/horror, under the Roc imprint, but the narrator is so unreliable that some or all of the fantastic occurrences may or may not have happened as she remembers them). But Abalyn's being transgendered is treated very realistically. It's a very dark book, but with a fairly upbeat ending; I recommend it highly.
The narrator, Imp, has various mental problems and readily admits this to the reader. She's writing to try to make sense of the strange things that have happened to her, or that she remembers happening. But she seems to have two different sets of memories of how events played out, and she isn't sure which, if either, is correct. She begins by telling us, fairly coherently, about her childhood, about an old painting of a girl about to drown herself which has influenced her art, about possibly seeing a girl drown herself in the quarry near her home when she was a girl, about how she met her girlfriend Abalyn, and about their life together. Then, as she gets to the inexplicable events that intersected with her breakup with Abalyn, she gets more confused, and the prose gets more stream-of-consciousness and harder to read -- but remains very rewarding, through that point to the more readable narrative that concludes the book.
Kiernan herself is trans. I haven't read anything else by her except this and The Red Tree (which doesn't have any trans characters in it, but which I recommend strongly; it's about as good as The Drowning Girl, though a little darker), but I plan to read more eventually.
A few quotes:
I haven't said anything about Abalyn being a transsexual..... She wouldn't have wanted me to make a big deal out of it, and it never mattered to me. That's why I haven't really brought it up until now.
...it was difficult for me to imagine that this beautiful woman had ever been a boy. I mean, that she'd ever been caught inside the body of a boy, of a man.
"...I think it's kind of neat. I mean, how many people ever experience physical transformation on the level you have?" ... ...."I've always been a woman, Imp. The hormones and the surgery, they didn't change me from one thing to another. That's why I hate the phrase 'sex change.' It's misleading. No one ever changed my sex. They just brought my flesh more in line with my mind. ...."
...I didn't understand, but I would. In the weeks and months to come... I'd learn a lot more -- too much -- about being one sort of being on the inside and another on the outside.
Links:
When Wasps Make Honey, the sequel to Wine Can't be Pressed into Grapes, is now available from Smashwords in EPUB format and Amazon in Kindle format. See here for more information.
The Gods are Bastards by D.D. Webb is a sword-and-sorcery Western. There are two trans characters among a large and diverse cast.
It’s set largely on the newly settled frontier of a continent-spanning empire in a secondary world with what seem at first to be the standard D&D-style set of sentient races (humans, elves, dwarves, drow, lizardfolk, etc.), but turn out to be more original than they first appear. (The dryads are particularly different from traditional portrayals of them.)
It’s an ongoing serial that updates very regularly, two or sometimes three times each week, with pretty substantial chapters. There is a large cast of characters, many of them with a fair number of scenes from their point of view, and a complex plot that seems to grow more complex over time. The main characters of the first few books are a class of college students, but more and more characters are introduced as the story progresses. At this point, each book is focusing on a subset of the characters, because there are too many for all of them to get a decent amount of attention in every book.
There are two trans characters introduced so far, Brother Ingvar, a trans man, and Rasha, a trans woman. Both seem like minor characters when first introduced, but Brother Ingvar at least becomes a major character later on, and Rasha has also had at least one POV scene, where she realizes she’s a woman. She was only introduced at the beginning of the current book (Book Eleven), and it’s too soon to know if she’ll be a major character in the epic as whole.
There is also some discussion about how trans people are treated by the different religions in this world. The author has put a lot of thought into the different religions and how several of them, despite great doctrinal differences, are semi-unified in an umbrella church organization, while others are outside it and considered “pagan”. It’s a world where the gods actively meddle in mortal affairs, and people don’t disagree about their existence, but about which of them are good role models to follow, which can be trusted to take decent care of their followers, etc. In early chapters I was dubious about this, thinking it looked like a Crystal Dragon Jesus — a religion with the exact same organizational structure as medieval Catholicism despite having totally different beliefs — but later on it gets more nuanced and believable.
A fair number of the characters are gay or bi, including basically all of the elves and fairies (except one asexual).
I recommend it highly to anyone who enjoys secondary-world fantasy.
The Stormlord Trilogy by Glenda Larke (called the Watergivers trilogy in Australia, and maybe some other countries) is a secondary world epic fantasy, consisting of three volumes, The Last Stormlord, Stormlord Rising, and Stormlord's Exile. I wholeheartedly recommend it as a fine adventure epic with nifty political intrigue, knotty moral dilemmas, clever and consistent worldbuilding, and emotionally affecting characterization. The reason I'm mentioning it here is one particular character, a FtM transsexual. He doesn't appear until the third book, but he has a fairly major role to play when he appears.
The series is set in a desert country which is watered by magically manipulated rainstorms. A small ruling class of stormlords and rainlords create artificial clouds from the sea and move them around inland to make it rain in the most suitable places and times. The population is about twenty times the number who could live there with only natural, random rain; and the stormlords are dying out -- an unusual number of the potential stormlords in the current generation died young, apparently coincidentally. There is only one aging stormlord managing the weather for this vast country, and he's starting to have to economize his efforts, deciding who will get rain and who won't on political criteria, because he can no longer supply the amount of rain people are used to relying on. The lower-ranking rainlords are going around searching for children with water talent in demographics which have rarely though occasionally produced stormlords.
There's also another form of magic, at once more limited and more powerful than the rainlords' abilities, and when the story begins most people don't know it exists. It is responsible for the transsexual character's transformation -- he's been given a masculine appearance without removing all traces of his original female biology. To avoid spoilers I'll say no more about this other magic system, except that it's another instance of Ms. Larke's well thought-out worldbuilding.
It's long but fast-paced -- each volume is around 600-700 pages, and I read each of them in two days or less.
There are sex scenes, but mostly oblique and offstage. There's rape, including of one major viewpoint character, but I think that's offstage.
I first heard of this author and series from the Galactic Suburbia podcast, which I also recommend; three Australian women talk about feminism and speculative fiction, occasionally including books with transgendered characters. They talked about this trilogy in episode 40.
When Wasps Make Honey, the sequel to Wine Can't be Pressed into Grapes, is now available from Smashwords in EPUB format and Amazon in Kindle format. See here for more information.
Wonder City Stories by Jude McLaughlin is a series of novels and short stories set in a world with superheroes, but the stories are not primarily about active superheroes (or supervillains). Most of the main characters are ordinary people with minor superpowers, who work regular jobs (construction work, barista, architect, journalist, therapist, etc.) and don't have codenames or crimefighting identities; some are retired superheroes, others young trainee heroes. Several characters are transgender, gender-fluid, or non-binary.
The stories tend to focus mainly around interpersonal drama, though there are also some superpowered fight scenes, and toward the end of each novel several characters -- both superheroes and ordinary people with and without powers -- come together to solve a crisis.
One of the main characters of the first two novels, and a minor character in the third, is FtM transsexual (and a werewolf). His mother is an inventor-type super; she's offered to invent him a gender-switching ray, but he refuses and goes through transition the hard way. He knows the government would quickly confiscate and suppress the gender-switching ray, and nobody would benefit from it except him.
One of the main characters of the third novel is MtF transsexual, though this isn't made explicit until late in the book.
The world has a deep history going back thousands of years, and several older characters with histories going back to WWII or earlier. The setting as whole reminds me a lot of Kurt Busiek's Astro City, though it's a little darker.
There are three complete novels so far, and nine short stories; the author recently started serializing a fourth novel.
Every Day by David Levithan (Knopf, 2012) is a novel whose main character, A, wakes up every morning in the body of a different person. "The Safe-Deposit Box" by Greg Egan (Asimov's SF, 1990) has the same basic premise, but a very different plot and tone.
In Every Day, A switches bodies every day at midnight -- awake or asleep. (It's not explained whether this is true local midnight, or the arbitrary midnight of the local time zone and adjusted for daylight savings time; it's not that kind of book.) While in a given person's body, A has some degree of access to their knowledge and experiential memories, but not to their skills. After A moves on, their former host usually has vague memories of a fairly uneventful day, but under unusual circumstances they can remember more of what A did while in their body, and this becomes important in the course of the story.
A inhabits the bodies of people of both sexes about equally often, and has (so we're told) no particular gender identity -- they're equally comfortable in girls' and boys' bodies. Their age is always pretty consistent, though. A is sixteen years old, and as long as they can remember they've worn bodies of whatever age they are at the time. They tend to wake up each day in a body fairly near where their previous body fell asleep; they've spent all their life in the English-speaking parts of North America, and have been in Maryland for a good while as the story begins, though they've moved long distances a few times when in the body of someone whose family was moving or traveling.
For years now A has tried to live a low-impact life, trying to fit into each host's daily routine as far as possible, and to act in character for the host so that their family and friends don't suspect anything and so their life won't be disrupted in any way. But one day he falls in love with his present host's girlfriend. This host, Justin, is somewhat abusive (verbally, not physically) of his girlfriend Rhiannon, and A can't bring himself to act in character for Justin; he treats Rhiannon far better than she's used to being treated, and paradoxically makes her fall deeper in love with Justin, whom she was maybe starting to think about breaking up with. After that, A can't resist breaking their other hosts' routines in order to make contact with Rhiannon again and again, to try to influence her to break up with Justin, to try to establish some relationship with her. And that misuse of their hosts' bodies and lives comes back to bite them.
I highly recommend this. The writing is beautiful, the characterization convincing, the plotting tight. The ending is somewhat problematic -- I'll avoid going into detail to avoid spoilers, but though it's plausible and in character, it's not entirely satisfying.
The basic premise, though many critics are raving about it as totally original, is basically the same as that of Greg Egan's short story "The Safe-Deposit Box" (Asimov's SF, September 1990; reprinted in his collection Axiomatic). What each author does with the idea, and the details of how the body-jumping works, are totally different; I'd recommend reading both. In Egan's story, the main character is always a man of about the same age, always in the same city; he switches bodies only when he sleeps, and can stay in the same body longer by forcing himself to stay awake for a couple of days. He says of his childhood:
"Now and then I woke up as a girl, but at some point (around the age of four, I think) this began to trouble me, and soon after that, it simply stopped happening."
Egan's is a science fiction puzzle story where the focus is on the narrator gradually collecting data on his host bodies, trying to figure out something about why he is the way he is, and finally making a breakthrough. The safe-deposit box of the title is where he collects his data; the 1990 equivalent of A's free web email accounts. Levithan's novel focuses on the love story and the ethical problems of living with a series of borrowed bodies and lives, and leaves the question of why A is the way they are unanswered. Both are valid approaches, and reading the two stories as a diptych suggests that there's a lot more life in this story idea.
Links:
When Wasps Make Honey, the sequel to Wine Can't be Pressed into Grapes, is now available from Smashwords in EPUB format and Amazon in Kindle format. See here for more information.
I've been slowly reading through Sarah Emma Edmonds' Nurse and Spy in the Union Army (1864). She was a Canadian immigrant who disguised herself as a man to serve in the Union army during the American Civil War. One passage of her book reminded me of those TG stories where someone is transformed into a woman either in order to evade military service, or as a punishment because they are unwilling to serve, such as The Professor's "Draft Dodger Rag" and many others:
Said he: “The women down South are the best recruiting officers—for they absolutely refuse to tolerate, or admit to their society, any young man who refuses to enlist; and very often send their lovers, who have not enlisted, skirts and crinoline, with a note attached, suggesting the appropriateness of such a costume unless they donned the Confederate uniform at once.”
I have often thought of this trait of the Southern ladies' character, and contrasted it with the flattering receptions so lavishly bestowed upon our able-bodied “home guards,” by the New-England fair ones who profess to love the old flag and despise its enemies. And I have wondered if an extensive donation of “crinoline” would not be more effectual in filling up our ranks, than graceful bows and bewitching smiles. And I would mildly suggest that each package of crinoline be accompanied by the following appropriate lines:
Now, while our soldiers are fighting our battles,
Each at his post to do all that he can,
Down among rebels and contraband chattels,
What are you doing, my sweet little man?
All the brave boys under canvas are sleeping,
All of them pressing to march with the van,
Far from their homes where their sweethearts are weeping;
What are you waiting for, sweet little man?
You, with the terrible warlike mustaches,
Fit for a colonel or chief of a clan,
You with the waist made for sword-belts and sashes,
Where are your shoulder-straps, sweet little man?
We send you the buttonless garments of woman!
Cover your face lest it freckle or tan;
Muster the apron-string guards on the common—
That is the corps for the sweet little man.
All the fair maidens about him shall cluster,
Pluck the white feathers from bonnet and fan,
Make him a plume like a turkey-wing duster—
That is the crest for the sweet little man.
Give him for escort a file of young misses,
Each of them armed with a deadly rattan,
They shall defend him from laughter and hisses
Aimed by low boys at the sweet little man.
Edmonds rarely cites authors for the poetry she includes in her book; that may mean that all the uncited poetry was her own, but I'm not sure. People had different ideas about credit and plagiarism in those days.
A lot of the details in her book are doubted or disputed by historians and biographers -- some think it's mostly made up and that she never served as a spy at all, only as a field nurse. I linked her Wikipedia article above, but I recommend also reading the talk page for that article as well, as there's a lot of discussion there about the contrary evidence that isn't yet addressed in the main article.
Whether it's a memoir, a historical novel, or some weird mix of the two, it's a fun read and I recommend it.
The short-lived television show Star Traders (1972-73) has long been legendary among fans of science-fictional TV with good stories and bad special effects. Canceled after less than two seasons, it was never widely syndicated partly because of the small number of episodes and mainly because of rights disputes in the wake of the bankruptcy of Silver Silo Studios. These rights disputes prevented any official video release until 1989, when a LaserDisc collection of six of the the best episodes had a limited distribution before being suppressed due to renewed lawsuits. There have been a few bootleg editions over the years; my first exposure to the show was via one of these, a set of VHS tapes with grainy video, echoey audio and Korean subtitles I watched in a friend’s basement some years ago. I recently became aware of a slightly higher quality set of AVI files in a torrent (obligatory note: I do not officially endorse torrenting of pirated content).
The show featured the crew of an interstellar trading vessel which typically visited a different planet or space station in each episode, looking to buy and sell various cargoes advantageously; variations in local laws and customs provide much of the plot conflict, as they find for instance that merchandise they had hoped to sell legally has been outlawed in the time since their last visit to a given planet. (The show wasn’t very consistent in its physics, but it took relativistic time dilation more seriously than Star Trek ever did. Decades of social and political upheaval passed on the planet Ereshkigal between the crew’s first visit there in episode three and their second in episode eighteen, while mere months passed for the crew.)
The crew of the Caravan included the jovial patriarch Captain Frederic Tunstall (Tim Siler); his wife Dr. Emily Tunstall (Ursula Kingman), the ship’s medical officer; dapper ladies' man First Mate Roger Enderby (Jeremy Walters), Dr. Tunstall’s younger brother; Chief Engineer Sven Larssen-Tunstall (Lars Svensen); his wife, Chief Steward Amy Larssen-Tunstall (Julie Siler); and a passel of other Tunstall cousins and in-laws in subordinate positions, and Tunstall children and grandchildren underfoot. It makes sense that if centuries pass on your home planet while you spend your career on a starship, you would bring your family along. First Mate Roger Enderby, the only unmarried character among the main cast, played something like the “Kirk” role in many episodes, being the focus of romantic subplots with a variety of women in various ports. The other main cast tended to be involved in intramarital drama B-plots more typical of a sitcom than a space adventure show, e.g. Dr. Tunstall’s constant efforts to get Captain Tunstall to cut back on the exotic alien pastries.
Those with an encyclopedic knowledge of 1970s character actors will notice that Star Traders did somewhat better than Star Trek in portraying women in positions of authority, but less well on racial diversity; all the main cast were white. In his defense, executive producer Quinn Siler pointed out that they were nearly all related. Critics further noted that much of the cast were hired from among Siler’s own extensive set of Hollywood hopeful cousins and in-laws, which undoubtedly helped with making the Tunstall family look like they were related.
The transgender element, my reason for reviewing the show here, appeared in the finale to season one and the scant six episodes of season two. In the final episode of the first season, the crew are on shore leave at the giant space station Raven-4 when a local terrorist group sets off a mind-shuffling device which affects everyone within a half-kilometer radius. Most people swap with someone fairly nearby, which means most of the crew end up in the bodies of relatives and shipmates (for instance, the Captain and the Doctor swap, as do the Chief Engineer and the Chief Steward), but some shuffle into the bodies of station natives or visiting crew from other ships, some of them nonhuman or even non-humanoid. (Non-humanoid aliens were generally represented by puppets, not very convincingly.) Nearly all were restored to their original bodies by the end of the episode, but the original body of First Mate Roger Enderby was killed in a riot, and he was stuck in the body of the lovely teal-skinned alien Siruanna (Raquel Lundquist, credited as a guest star in this episode). Walters left the cast as of the end of season one, while Lundquist joined the main cast and was added to the opening credits beginning with season two; several episodes of season two involve a B-plot focusing on Enderby’s discomfort with and gradual adjustment to his new body — not just his altered gender, but the new senses his alien body has (he’s empathic, and sees five primary colors including ultraviolet and infrared).
Various zines have published interviews over the years containing contradictory statements from Walters, Lundquist, and Siler about the reasons for the switch. Reading between the lines, it appears that Siler found Walters personally hard to work with, but decided, on the basis of fan mail, that his character was too popular to kill off. This unique solution allowed him to fire the actor and keep the character. Whether it was a good solution may never be known; I freely admit my bias, the cause of which will be obvious to my readers here, toward thinking the six episodes of the second season more interesting than most of the first season. Raquel Lundquist was a fine actress, too little remembered (chiefly for guest roles on M*A*S*H and Columbo), and could, I think, have done great things with the role of Enderby if the show had continued for another season or two. Alas, she was still growing into the role when the show ended, and most of the zine articles I’ve run across vociferously disagree with the producer’s decision. I note merely that these critics did not have to work with Walters; his tenure on two other shows was similarly brief and in 1975 he left acting for a career in sales.
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