Contrasting Transness: Kai Cheng Thom's Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars and Thomas Page McBee's Man Alive

Abstract

Since the 1990s, a growing corpus of trans memoirs has expanded the literary representation of trans lives. These memoirs normally explore trauma, transition, confrontation with their pasts, and personal healing. Within this context, this article examines the portrayal of transfemininity and transmasculinity through a comparative study of Kai Cheng Thom’s Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars and Thomas Page McBee’s Man Alive.  Thom and McBee construct their trans identities through different narrative strategies: Thom emphasises transfeminine identities as bodies intersected by multiple axes of marginalisation, whilst McBee presents a more solitary trajectory that interrogates masculinity and its entanglement with violence. Firstly, I situate both memoirs in relation to the conventions of trans writing, tracing how each text simultaneously adopts and subverts to reconfigure different modes of representation. Secondly, I analyse the narrative tropes that permeate these texts, such as geographical displacement, (non)linearity, and temporality as central devices in the articulation of trans experience. I argue that both authors reconceptualise transness as an ongoing process rather than a fixed arrival, navigating tensions of pathologisation, community and shared history. In this sense, these memoirs operate as critical interventions within trans studies, reorienting dominant narratives and discourses surrounding trans embodiment and identity.