Emily St. James on Using Differing POVs to Write a Trans Novel

Before I accepted my own transness, I spent far too many evenings browsing Reddit, YouTube, and Instagram, looking at the timelines of trans people who had leapt out into the great unknown that was medical transition. Across the months, their bodies metamorphosed, and their personal senses of style grew more distinct. So many of them became so, so, so, so, so hot.

The little voice in the back of my brain that took great pains to assure me I either wasn’t trans or wasn’t trans enough used these transformations as its single greatest piece of evidence for why I should not transition. Yes, those people seemed better, even happier, but the results hormone replacement therapy had delivered unto them seemed borderline magical.

HRT would have no real way to turn my slouching, ungainly body into anything other than a slightly lumpier version of itself. So I convinced myself to detach from anything like agency in favor of waiting for a genie or magic curse to turn me into my truest self, Taylor Swift’s somehow even more normcore older sister.

Then one day, I read a comment on a post that said the single biggest change in any trans timeline was in the eyes. I scrolled up and looked, and sure enough, a dull nothingness lived behind the eyes of the figure on the “before” side of the timeline. On the “after” side, however, a light had turned on. Where once had been a simulacrum of a human, stitched together via a series of learned behaviors and social codes, was now a person, someone living life on their own terms.

I’d link you to the post in question, but it’s really every trans timeline. Eyes are dead; eyes wake up. And yet the transition narrative in mainstream art focuses so much on the externalities of a changing body, rather than the internality that is suddenly realizing you have what might be dubbed a soul.

This focus on the external propagates something pernicious: an idea that transition is predominantly for others, who will then engage with you in a different way, rather than for the self. The conundrum here is that my understanding of all of this is retroactive.

The me of 2018, on the cusp of self-acceptance, could not conceive of living a life that wasn’t built to some extent out of others’ expectations. The me of 2025 struggles to understand how I went so long allowing people who weren’t me to define my existence.

The question, then, is how to convey that internal quality within the transition narrative. The answer to this from many other trans writers has been to situate two characters on either side of the transition divide, thus allowing the transition narrative to happen implicitly. The before and after exist in two completely different people.

For instance, Imogen Binnie’s brilliant Nevada handles this by focusing on a jaded trans woman and the possible egg (someone who is probably trans but has yet to accept that identity) she winds up bound to by odd destiny. Similarly, Torrey Peters’s Detransition, Baby features one point-of-view character who is many years past her transition and another who detransitioned and is now living again as a man.

In both books, the reader is given the implicit instruction to examine the two characters as foils. How the characters are—and aren’t—self-actualized creates a tension that punctures the typical transition narrative.

Yet capturing the internality of transition to its fullest degree would also necessarily involve writing about dissociation. As a trans person ages into adulthood, they become more unmoored from their most essential self. In my case, it felt like I had crammed all of myself into my brain. I had a body, yes, but it was immaterial, simply a vehicle to tote my brain around.

Yet dissociation is murderously hard to describe! For the most part, it’s best understood by its absence, which is to say that once your very self starts to rematerialize, you might find yourself saying, “Oh, was I dissociated all those years?” Fortunately, literature offers one weird trick to capture the feeling of coming back into oneself: voice.

Consider, for example, those titanic tomes of queer literature Moby-Dick and War and Peace. Melville uses first-person to haunting effect, not only placing Ishmael onboard a doomed whaling vessel but using his frequent discursive odysseys into whale facts to create a sense of someone who is doing a terrible job at processing his trauma.

Ishmael seems to have a degree of knowledge of the others onboard the Pequod no person could possess, but read through the lens of PTSD, he starts to seem like someone trying to understand every single aspect of the tragedy that befell him..

In War and Peace, Tolstoy’s use of third person is best understood as omniscient, but within that omniscience are suggestions that what we are reading is a series of close third-person narratives knit together by occasional pullbacks into the widest of wide shots and frequent digressions from Tolstoy himself. The effect, then, is somewhat like a film. The narration functions like a camera, zooming in and out and following characters into a scene, then exiting with another.

Pierre, the closest thing the book has to a protagonist and literature’s eggiest egg (seriously, the man has a crying fit when he holds a pair of women’s gloves), directly comments on this quality, suggesting the people in his orbit are all merely trapped by history. To feel as though you exist outside of yourself or that you have no agency are pretty classic signs of dissociation too.

So maybe what we are really talking about here is how to write about low-grade trauma, the kind that never becomes actively disruptive but instead feels like having a mild but painful sunburn over one’s psyche. Transness pre-transition often feels like this, and here, too, literature can use voice to create a tension between reader and narrative.

Hazel Jane Plante’s astonishing Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian) uses the first person to root the reader deep in a trans woman’s hyper-fixation on her favorite television show as a way to avoid thinking too directly about her dead friend. Tamsyn Muir’s operatic sci-fi/horror mashup Harrow the Ninth uses the second person to directly depict dissociation in a way that confounds many readers but thrills me.

And Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport is technically a first-person monologue that, nevertheless, shows how attempts to avoid thinking about painful subjects blur the lines between first-, second-, and third-person voices.

I would love to say I was actively thinking about all of the above when I started writing my novel Woodworking, which is told in alternating third-person and first-person chapters, but in truth, I knew the book would be structured that way before I quite knew what the book was.

Now that I’ve had time to think about it, I’ve realized that both voices allowed me to capture an experience of dissociation. First person granted me a kind of traumatized tunnel vision that shut out much of the world, while third person captured the pain of a life lived in a dissociative cocoon.

But that understanding is only applied retroactively. When I started—both writing my book and transitioning—I had only the faith that there was an after to get to from before.

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Woodworking by Emily St. James is available via Zando/Crooked Media Reads.