“Trans-ing: a Transwoman’s Story Beyond Transnormative Life Writing”
This dissertation engages with examples of transgender experience in relation to my own reality as a transwoman in the Western Cape, South Africa. My purpose is to assert the value of transwomen’s lives and experiences at all stages of their being, beyond socially-preferred traditional narratives of transition. In my writing and thinking, I work both with and against received parameters of life writing, seeking to move beyond society’s expectations of what constitutes acceptable, transnormative life narration, whether in terms of familiar subject matter, foci, tropes or scope. I draw on the concept of trans-ing, inspired by Hil Malatino’s research, to position transgender identity as always individually in process, rather than typified by a simplistically representative ‘before’ versus ‘after’. This processual and ongoing advocacy for transness as necessary incompletion is a core part of my investigation into transness, trans lives and efforts to reconfigure transnormative life writing. To explore this, I find points of intersection between my own autoethnographic account of trans becoming in the Cape Flats, Cape Town and Stellenbosch, and other transwomen’s life storying. A section of the dissertation engages with the precarious voices of transwomen more marginalised even than I am. Another section engages with the trans memoirs of Anastacia Tomson, Always Anastacia: A Transgender life in South Africa (2016), Landa Mabenge Becoming Him: A Trans Memoir of Triumph (2018), Juliet Jacques Trans (2015) and Kate Bornstein Gender Outlaw (1994). I show that these memoirs variously adopt and adapt familiar transnormative life writing conventions such as linear narration, gender continuity, the psycho-medical aspect of transitioning, and transitioning as entailing pre- and post-operation focal points. In this dissertation, I include fragments of my own trans(itioning) experiences, as in the memoir account Kleintjie, which imaginatively recollects aspects of my childhood and gendered mis/education. Appropriately, I draw on ideas of intersectionality and resilience to highlight underexplored intersections in the lives of transwomen, and the theory of slow violence to highlight how the challenges faced by transwomen are systemic yet intimate, ongoing yet dramatically changeable at every stage of our lives. The creative-experiential accounts in this dissertation are a deliberate part of my auto-theoretical research method, in which lived experience, creativity and critical resources are considered equally valid modes of investigative enquiry and presentation. In depicting transness across multiple modes of experience, account and anecdotal correspondence, my research actively re-searches for generative ways of representing and understanding what it means to be a transgender woman. Through this method I am able to emphasise that trans life writing cannot be envisaged as a linear, chronological mode in which the textual sections chart a clear developmental progress towards gender norms, from some putative start to a completed finish. Instead, such writing is far more productively to be considered processual, a model that more aptly conveys the necessarily fluid and elusive repertoires of highly individuated efforts and decisions about gender that tend to characterise transgender experiences. As my very dissertation embodies, such life writing, then, gives rise to forms of narration that cross and transgress boundaries, definitions and practices (Schmidt 84).
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