Transitions The Unheard Stories from jane fae and Trans Actual CIC is out now and can be bought from their website for £12 plus postage. Reviewing the book for us, Laura Kate Dale writes;
Transitions The Unheard Stories is a book about trans lives, explicitly written for a cisgender audience. The book makes no secret of this fact, opening by addressing cis readership and what they should hopefully take away from the book. The problem is, while I think a good percentage of the book will probably have value as a tool for humanising and educating, that potential is severely hampered by an unfocused and lengthy rambling introduction, and authorial choices made that I believe will be off-putting for the audience the book explicitly aims to capture.
Let’s start by talking a little about, structurally, what Transitions is. The book is part personal essay series by author Jane Fae, and part an anthology of trans stories connected by relation to life in the UK, conducted as interviews and framed through Fae’s editorial lens.
In theory, the book opens with some basic terms and definitions a cis audience might need to understand to engage with the material, then talks about the history of transness globally and within the UK specifically, then the realities of modern day life in the UK as a trans person, interspersed with stories of trans life that are ultimately unconnected to the themed sections they’re sandwiched in between.
While I think the Transitions The Unheard Stories does have some value to a cis audience, I feel the need to start this review addressing its more notable missteps, and in my opinion they begin as early as the opening paragraph of the book’s introduction, which uses terms like “Heterodox Coalition” and “Anti-trans Confabulation” in quick succession, without explanation or definition. Both of these are examples of language use where much more commonly understood alternative words exist.
These word choices instantly make the book feel like the author was more interested in showcasing a wide vocabulary than making the text accessible to a wide range of readers. It’s not a common issue through the rest of the book, but it’s the kind of choice that feels like it’s right from moment one failing to keep in mind that its top priority should be not scaring away cis readers who are interested enough in understanding trans lives to have taken the step of opening its first page.
The introduction more broadly is lengthy and unfocused. Over the course of 17 pages very little context is given for what the book is actually going to be. By the end of the introduction I wasn’t yet aware the book was explicitly focusing on UK transition stories, or that it was largely a collection of editorialised interviews. The introduction ultimately only served to ramble and fill space, delaying getting to the promised structure of the piece.
The introduction also felt rooted in a perspective of trans oppression that lacked context for intersectionality, with fae at one point stating that the world ““grants bodily autonomy to 99.9% of the population while denying it to the small number of individuals who are trans”. Trans people are far from the only societal group denied bodily autonomy, with cis women, people of colour, and specifically black people often denied it too.
This is followed by a first chapter that purports to be a collection of definitions to help the reader understand terms that may come up in the essay collection, which is similarly unfocused. Ten pages are spent in this chapter before a single definition is provided, with diversions in that ten pages including the author’s posed query “Why kick off a book that centres personal experience with an essay on the nature of science?”. Why indeed, I asked while reading a chapter that was allegedly here to educate cis readers on basic terms they may need to know.
The rambling nature of the definitions section of the book is made all the more frustrating by what it leaves out. A LOT of terminology and concepts integral to understanding the essays in the book are not explained in this definitions chapter, with fae at one point explicitly stating that explaining the distinction between sex and gender was “beyond the scope” of a book that had space for ten pages of diversion before its first definition was given. Once or twice in the book fae uses annotations to provide definitions for terms or concepts at the bottom of certain pages, but this is also woefully underused.
It could have filled the gap left by how the definitions chapter was delivered. While Transitions does credit an editor, my feeling reading the introductory sections of the book was that its editorial process was not lengthy or thorough. An example that stands out, the book discusses Imane Khalif and the controversy surrounding her at this year’s Olympics, which took place less than two weeks before I received my review copy of the book. These kinds of incredibly recent additions to the book do suggest it came together at a very recent point in time, and that there was limited time between content being locked and the book being finalised for print. This is further emphasised by basic copy editing mistakes in the book being routinely missed such as numerous words missing from sentences, spelling mistakes, and incorrect page formatting errors such as missing spaces between words.
Transitions The Unheard Stories takes 41 pages to reach its first personal essay from a contributor, and while there is some valuable material in those pages, it’s incredibly poorly focused. Of note, the discussions of the accusation the term cis is a slur is well written, as are the discussions of slur reclamation within the trans community. Once this book focuses on a task, it delivers well communicated informative information. It just waffles a LOT about the author’s personal philosophical views before getting to serving the cis audience needing an education that it is supposedly here to serve.
In the ramp up to finally introducing the book’s “Unheard Voices”, fae discusses the need for a diversity of stories to be told by the book, and the importance of diversity in whose voices were included. I wish she had acknowledged during this section that the book’s invited voices were all going to be people who in part transitioned living in the UK, a major factor in the kind of stories the book platforms.
In addition, I was a little disappointed that fae’s reason given for not including the voices of under 18 trans people was that “it felt like a headache I did not need”. It’s a strange thing for an author to admit, in a book supposedly making the effort to platform voices who are not currently being platformed properly in UK trans discussions. There are ways to anonymise under 18 accounts, or at least better excuses to give for excluding them from this style of pseudo anthology.
I know I am being harsh on the opening portion of Transitions The Unheard Stories, but I do so from a place of wishing the book were easier to recommend without caveats. There’s a real quality turning point in the book when it reaches the first batch of external stories, and I wish I didn’t need to caveat things so heavily to get readers to that point.
So, let’s get into some of the positives, as this is where Transitions starts to pick up in quality.
Transitions occasionally makes use of poetry as a transitionary tool to bridge the gap between fae’s personal essay segments and the stories of other contributors, and these are honestly one of the highlights of the book, injecting some much needed unfiltered personality to the text, and playing with both form and function to great effect. Mirror Stage by Elias J Dionstad for example is visual and structurally tactile, while Hair by Mal Fox for example plays around with the realities of trans masculine hair growth not always being directable to the places one might first wish. These poems throughout are a chance for their authors to have their unfiltered voices heard, and that’s something the book truly needs.
As we start to get into the first stories section of the book, it becomes apparent that while the book is called Unheard Stories, these stories are ultimately going to be delivered through fae’s editorial lens, using quotes from contributors and building a narrative framework around them. While this was initially disappointing, I had hoped to hear unfiltered experiences from those contributors rather than through jane fae’s lens, I cannot deny this is where her skills ultimately lie as a writer.
While she may use a somewhat repetitive narrative framework and structure when telling each person’s story, she understands how to weave a concise narrative out of a life story, something not easy to do. Human lives rarely make for neat structured narratives, and fae does an admirable job for the most part of constructing that kind of structure out of the interviews provided, allowing large paragraphs of quoted text with minimal interruptions.
jane fae is a reporter, not an op ed columnist. You can see where she flourishes. She’s at her most focused when working within this structure, acting as a conduit for turning quotes into a digestible storyline.
The first story in the book is that of Anja, a trans cop. I wouldn’t have made that choice if this book were aimed at a trans audience, but I can understand making that choice in a book that’s trying to make transition stories palatable. It’s presenting a law abiding face to who transphobia impacts.
The first batch of stories is truly where Transitions as a book starts to pick up. One example early on that particularly stood out to me was when a contributor named Jake shared an anecdote of being asked as a young adult what name he would have gone by if he’s been born a boy, and that question bringing back a childhood of buried and forgotten fantasising about transition in an instant flash flood of emotion. The discussion of that trans reawakening as not a moment where the desire to transition began, but was simply unearthed by the right question years later, captures a very real kind of transition story, emphasising that even when a desire to transition may appear to crop up out of nowhere, it’s often more the bubbling to the surface of something long since buried.
This isn’t to say the story portions of the book are perfect. fae makes some unfortunate missteps and introduces some outdated languages in places, such as describing one interviewee as “diagnosed very high on the autism scale” for example.
These stories also, ultimately, focus very much on trans lives during the transition process, more so than beyond that process. I guess it makes sense, the book is named Transitions and it seems this is the part of the trans experience fae seeks to demystify for a cis audience, but it does somewhat feel like it, at times, reduces trans lives down to transition, and has limited room for what life beyond transition looks like.
Beyond the first batch of stories from interviewees, we move onto fae’s essay on the history of transness globally and particularly in the UK. Where I was highly critical of her introduction and definitions chapters, something really seems to change here, with fae infinitely more focused and on point in this section, and her personal essay sections to follow. Most of my complaints about the introduction of the book completely fade away here, with fae far more focused and to the point with her prose, delivering concisely on the promised focus of the topic.
It’s at this point on first reading that I really solidified my feelings on the introductory segments of Transitions The Unheard Stories. There is a quality level reached in the stories segments and fae’s later essays that is far more consistent. If the entire book were this strong, while I would still have critiques, they would have been far more minor and granular.
I honestly feel like if this book had cut most of its first 40 or so pages, and replaced them with footnote word definitions throughout the remaining wordcount, this would have been a far more approachable book, and one far more effective at reaching the audience it’s aiming for. I am frustrated reading the opening sections because I can see that fae is capable of much more engaging work. My issues being frontloaded is frustrating because they’re positioned such that they’re most likely to put off a fresh reader from reaching the best parts of the book.
jane makes some very strong individual points both here and in her third and final essay segment, talking about the current reality of trans life in the UK. In particular, I think her asking “Does the right to transition actually exist if it comes with a decade long wait to access care?” is effective messaging for a cis audience. By her third essay segment fae really feels like she’s settled into less of an academic tone with the book, a little less afraid to use emotion alongside sharing facts and allowing some of her own perspective in as support to a focused narrative.
Her discussions of how easy it is for cis people to access HRT, as well as her breakdown of the transphobia that fuelled the recent Cass Report, are also well written and concise, breaking down misconceptions and humanising the trans people behind the impacts of these choices. fae at times gets pretty doom and gloom, with little optimism or hope for the future of the trans community in the UK, but that can again perhaps be forgiven in the context of a cis audience focused work, as an attempted wake up call to action.
While I feel the stories shared by other voices in the book are generally of a consistent quality, I do want to note that it does feel like the book’s most interesting stories, from the most diverse backgrounds, are somewhat batched together late in the book, in a way that felt notable.
Additionally, toward the end of the book, there’s one essay by an author named Shea that really bucks the trend of the rest of the book, being a personal essay written by Shea herself rather than an interview translated through jane fae’s lens. This essay stood out as one of the most engaging in the book, purely because Shea’s voice is allowed to more directly come through in the piece. It was exciting to see someone’s story told unfiltered, something I wish the book had made more room for.
Going into reviewing Transitions The Unheard Stories I knew it was a book touting a focus on untold stories, and written for a cis audience. The main things I wondered going in was whether the book was going to platform diverse “unheard” voices adequately, and whether it was going to put cis palatability over diversity in the kinds of stories told. While There was ultimately some diversity in the accounts shared in terms of background of those spoken to, the book is from a decidedly UK influenced lens by necessity, and features stories that do feel selected at least in part for palatability. It’s honestly about what I expected in that regard, stories that to a cis audience are likely to feel like they’re varied, touching on new ideas they’ve not encountered, while feeling considerably more safe to a trans reader.
I think there is a version of Transitions The Unheard Stories that could serve as an effective humanising and educational tool for a specific kind of cisgender reader, with an interest in being an ally, but with questions born of recently heard media misinformation, looking to clear things up and hear about trans lives. I would honestly recommend skipping ahead to the first batch of stories if someone picks it up and struggles feeling it lacks focus. I fear the opening of the book may prevent the people it would most benefit from getting to the part of the book that feels most focused and informative.
I wish Transitions The Unheard Stories were an easier recommendation. There’s a potentially useful resource here, mostly hampered by an introduction that sincerely needed redrafting and making more concise.
