“Transition Makes Things Easier, But It Doesn’t Fix Everything”: “Trans” Author Juliet Jacques

Juliet Jacques has written a memoir, “Trans” (available now from Verso), based around her transition but encompassing a wide sweep of her life, from disaffected teendom in rural England to politically angry but established adulthood in London. Jacques’ transition was chronicled in the Orwell Prize-nominated column she wrote for the Guardian, “My Transgender Journey,” which began in 2010 and lasted three years. However, “Trans” is a broader take on what it was like coming of age in the transphobic ’90s, navigating an identity via music, film, literature, football, gender theory and a slowly expanding circle of role models.

Salon caught up with Jacques for a conversation about writing, censorship, politics and parents.

You’ve already been in the public eye, but still, writing this book must have been terrifying.

Absolutely. Writing this memoir was much more public, more permanent than anything I’ve done before. I had to have a quite stressful conversation with my parents, saying “This is what’s going in about you.” The same thing with friends.

I had lots of anxieties about the wider public. Arguments about how trans people are represented in the media, and how we represent ourselves, are very heated at the moment, so publishing this book in that context was terrifying.

To what extent did you feel you had to censor yourself because of that?

Some issues that would have been really controversial don’t concern me or didn’t fit the narrative. But I think we live in a climate that’s becoming increasingly censorious. There’s so much pressure on trans people to be good role models and, yes, maybe I could have said more about my sex life and my relationship with my body if there weren’t all these competing pressures from conservatives, certain feminists and the trans community.

Some scenes are heartbreaking to read and must have been painful to write. How did you look after yourself through that?

It was really difficult to reinhabit some moments in the book, and to do so thoroughly enough to create something interesting, poetic, or politically worthwhile. The hardest part was in chapter five, where I decided to kill myself. I knew that bit was coming for a long time and was building up to writing it. The way I dealt with that was to make sure I wrote the next episode – where I decide not to and, the following day, I’m still alive and I play football, well, feeling that nothing else mattered – at same time. After I’d written that, nothing else seemed quite so daunting.

You say explicitly in your book that you see who you are as inherently political. How have you been aware of your politics shaping your identity?

I became very conscious of my mindset changing around 2005, when I discovered that line of (mainly North American) transgender theory: Kate Bornstein, Leslie Feinberg, Pat Califia and others, leading to Julia Serano and Paul Preciado. This theory wasn’t so much about making a smooth move from male to female or vice versa, more about creating areas between them or around them, and creating a better language to discuss our experiences.

As a child I had the terms “transvestite” or “transsexual” and neither really suited me. “Transvestite” had all these sexual connotations and the stereotype was of a high-powered male lawyer wearing his wife’s underwear. “Transsexual” described someone who’d gone through a medical process, which I hadn’t and, at the time, wasn’t sure I wanted to. “Transgender” gave me this grey area; it gave me some intellectual space to move in.

Trans memoirs like Jan Morris’s and Lili Elbe’s seem very “of their time” now and make you realize how dialogue has changed. Do you imagine yourself looking back at your book in the same way one day? 

Absolutely. Really, this book aims to make itself irrelevant. It’s reflexive about the way memoirs have been used and the obligation on trans people to write autobiographically. I do use that form but I critique it heavily and try to infuse it with politics, theory and history. I’m trying to move the conversation on to those things.

You say in the book that inclusion in feminist spaces isn’t the most pressing issues for trans people but that, once those debates begin to influence health and social care policy, they become a bigger deal. Given that, how much attention do you give these days to feminist battles over trans issues?