Love is complicated, and when your body doesn’t match what you feel inside, it gets even harder. As a transgender person, I struggled ever believing that I could be in a romantic relationship. I always felt that my internal issues with my gender would cast a shadow over other aspects of my person or that my gender would interfere with whatever feelings a possible partner would have. So I’ve lived vicariously through books.
Diverse identities and cultures in media are becoming increasingly popular. It has helped people understand others and themselves.
“Real portrayals, not just stereotypes, are crucial to help marginalized people and break down biases,” according to the advocacy group Diversity For All.
We’ve seen this diversity grow in movies, so why not books?
When I’m searching for transgender young adult (YA) books, I feel like I’ve read them all. Every Google search leads to lists of “the best transgender and non-binary YA books” and “the best LGBTQ YA books,” all full of familiar titles. Out of the billions of YA books ever written, when I try to see myself in them, it’s like I’m chasing something that doesn’t actually exist.
The first book I read that truly gave me an idea of who I am was Act Cool by Tobly McSmith. It’s a story about a transgender teenager who ran away from an unsupportive home to join an acting school in New York. Act Cool really helped me understand all of the feelings I was trying to push away, so I began my search for other books that were centered around transgender teens.
As I came to terms with what being transgender meant for me individually, I started to wonder what it would mean romantically. I’ve always been a hopeless romantic, but the rom-coms my friends would read would just make me upset. They never showed what it would look like when your gender and sex don’t match up.
I’ve been in one serious relationship, and it ended because I wasn’t “boy enough” for him. That’s the last romantic relationship I’ve been in. It felt like I would never have a successful partnership because I am transgender, which is an aspect of my life I’m not able to control. So characters in books had relationships for me. Slowly, I’ve been able to become open to relationships because these book characters had success. I know that books aren’t reality, but they are similar enough that I can find hope.
However, it’s so hard to find these books. YA books about LGBTQ youth are met with hatred because people often feel that the identities and sexuality are being forced onto children.
One of my favorite books, Spy Stuff by Matthew J. Metzger, has been met with a lot of hate. It’s about a transgender teen named Anton who moves to a different school and eventually falls into a relationship with a boy named Jude. Anton and Jude explore what it means to be in a relationship where one of the partners is transgender. Metzger writes about the realistic struggles with Anton’s dysphoria and explores how sexual activities would happen. While this relatable and informative book can be helpful for transgender teens, many believe it is crude. However, another YA book, A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas, has multiple sex scenes, much more than Spy Stuff, and faces far less criticism.
The fact that books face less hate when they have romance but only if they are heterosexual and cisgender is an accurate depiction of society today. Transgender teens face criticism in relationships because of their identity, while cisgender teens face criticism because people think their partner’s personality doesn’t match them. That’s why, for many transgender teens, it’s easier to just live vicariously through YA books.
Because transgender teens often struggle to find or open themselves up to a romantic relationship, it’s crucial that they’re able to see themselves in YA books in order to hopefully prepare them for a relationship that can be safe and romantic.