Last month, Australian author Craig Silvey released his first book in a decade, Honeybee. It’s about a young person named Victoria, identified throughout much of the book by the name Sam and by male pronouns. Amid a backdrop of intense and traumatic circumstances in their life, Victoria begins to articulate to themselves that they are transgender. Their experiences of gender dysphoria, alongside the tensions in their relationship to often toxic masculinity, underscore much of Honeybee’s narrative.
Silvey, who you may recall wrote Jasper Jones, is a cis man, and perhaps not best placed to tell this story. He says he did extensive research and consulted with trans people, and that his intentions in writing it were to be a force for good. I don’t doubt any of that. But that doesn’t make the book’s tropes or trauma-mining any less jarring to read as a trans person.
Picking apart the specific instances in which a cis person has done a poor job of portraying trans experience is a boring exercise, one I’ve done countless times about countless ill-advised works. But I do feel invested in the larger discussion, and think there’s merit in unpacking who benefits – and who doesn’t – when we platform works about marginalised communities from people who don’t share that identity.
For me, the argument for prioritising “own voices” narratives – that is, stories in which the protagonist and author share the same identity – is fairly straightforward. For one, narratives informed by someone’s personal history are going to draw on a richer and more emotionally resonant background than those that don’t. No amount of research or good intentions will substitute for lived experience, and those narratives are by and large less likely to rely on tropes and caricatures, or make awkward – potentially damaging – missteps.
To be clear, I don’t think authors are obliged to exclusively create worlds that correlate exactly with their lived experience. Cis writers, for instance, can and should include three-dimensional portrayals of gender-diverse characters in their work. But that’s something entirely different to writing a first-person perspective that’s very distinct from your own, that depicts someone unpacking and articulating an essential aspect of their identity. This feels particularly troublesome when those depictions are focused so heavily on the harm trans people experience, as they often are. No matter how tender or heartbreaking a narrative it is, it’s exploitative for cis authors to centre a trans identity – particularly when that inspiration comes from a real person – in a way that feels like the most valuable thing a gender-diverse character can offer readers is their trauma.
It’s interesting to contrast a book like Honeybee – one that has a narrative driven by ostensibly realistic events – with the work of non-binary Australian author Alison Evans. Their queer YA novels – from Highway Bodies’ zombie dystopia to the magic fantasy of Euphoria Kids – often depict scenarios that are at once familiar and otherworldly, but their depictions of gender-diverse characters, taken from lived experience, are handled with care and compassion.
There’s an argument that, at the very least, trans narratives by high-profile cis writers are opening up the eyes of readers who otherwise wouldn’t be exposed to them. There’s the argument for “starting a conversation”. But I don’t know that I trust cis authors to be the ones at the head of those conversations, particularly when, once a book is written, they are able to immediately tap out of that identity – a luxury not granted to own-voices creators. Empathy is about being invited into an experience that isn’t your own and appreciating its difference, not trying to figure out how you could repurpose that experience in a way that centres yourself.
Ultimately, there are great manuscripts by trans authors that may never be published. There are published works by trans authors, about trans people, that won’t achieve close to the same attention as one like Honeybee. That’s not the fault of any individual author, but part of being a good ally is knowing when and how to use your platform to lift others up – there are ways of advocating for trans people that don’t require writing a book attempting to capture their experiences. Sometimes, it just means knowing how to take a step back.
• Alex Gallagher is a writer and poet
