Sexual Devolution
The Caledonian Trans Reveal, Part 1
A chàirdean,
Back in 2024 I was asked to contribute a chapter to the forthcoming Routledge Companion to Scottish Literature, with the broadest brief to write about trans literature in a Scottish cultural context. Trans literature in a Scottish cultural context occupies about 85% of my thinking time, so it was a challenge to pick a subject, but in the end I used the opportunity to work away at an issue that had been niggling at me for years: why, in the last decade or so of the twentieth century, were there so many novels about trans characters in Scottish literature, and why had no-one written about it?
The Companion will be published next year. I’m very proud of the chapter, which I hope will go some way towards opening up the field of trans studies in Scottish literature, so I’m looking for more ways to share and discuss the ideas. Next week I’ll be doing a panel at the University of Aberdeen (online and in person, do come) about the chapter to kick off some of these discussions with a range of artists and scholars. With the kind permission of the editors and publisher, I’m also going to serialise a version of the chapter for this blog, reworking the material in a more accessible voice. It’s going to take a couple of months, over at least four posts: there’s a lot of ground to cover! This first post just introduces the subject, the books, and some of the tools I’ll be using.
I don’t have a complete Scottish Trans Literary Theory to give you. That’s partly due to my own limitations as a scholar, but also due to the limitations of the field: Scotland has been notably slow to get going in developing both the literature and the theory, despite having a bizarrely rich corpus to draw on. A lot of what this chapter does is just pointing at the books and going, What is this? Can we not discuss this? All I want to do is offer a few tools for looking at Scottish literature transly, some early ideas on what might be going on. That is, I want to stir the shit. Given that Scottish literature has spent a couple of decades publishing some very odd books about trans characters in the absence of trans voices, it’s time to speak back.
The child bad: ‘Tak this damysele
And spulȝe now, that all may sé,
Quhidder scho man or woman be’
– John Asloan, The Buke of The Sevyne Sagis, 1513/1542It had been exciting, first the not knowing what Robin was, then the finding out.
– Ali Smith, Girl Meets Boy, 2007
20th century Scottish literature is shaped by a long series of political failures and the very occasional success. The attempted Renaissance of the 1920s and 30s, with its associated nationalist movements and linguistic revitalisers (think of Somhairle MacGill-Eain and Hugh MacDiarmid), ran aground in war. A second and broader renaissance flowered in the 1970s and 80s around the failed devolution referendum of 1979, when the majority voted for a national assembly but the electorate wasn’t big enough – you can think of writers like James Kelman, Liz Lochhead and Alasdair Gray coming of literary age. I suppose I belong to a cultural generation that came of age around the even bigger failure of the 2014 independence referendum. It’s maybe still too soon to theorise whether we’ve produced anything of lasting value, though what I hear most often is “Where are all the indyref novels?” Each of these moments was a burst of Scottish cultural hope, taking a different form each time, each meeting its limits.
1997, however, was a moment of more unqualified national self-confidence: 74% in favour of a Scottish Parliament with tax-varying powers, 60% of the electorate voting. As in the 20s and the 70s, there was an associated self-confident push of peculiarly Scottish writing, establishing the careers of many of the writers who still dominate the literature today. What is particularly weird about the authors of that third flowering, however, is just how many of them wrote a novel about a trans character.
The extent of the roll-call really is remarkable. Iain Banks’ 1984 The Wasp Factory, bridging to the previous generation, in which a teenage psychopath tortures animals and murders family members until s/he discovers that h/er father has been lying to h/er: a dog didn’t bite off h/er infant penis, s/he just has a vagina and he’s been dosing h/er with testosterone. (I’m going to spoiler all of these books; they’re better reads if you know the twist.) Val McDermid’s 1995 The Mermaids Singing, in which a transsexual serial killer ritually tortures gay men because she’s too ugly and no-one loves her. Christopher Whyte’s 1999 The Warlock of Strathearn, in which a bicultural magician transforms himself into a woman in order to win the heart of the lesbian he loves. (Whyte’s earlier Euphemia MacFarrigle and the Laughing Virgin also features a gender-swapping Satan in the margins.) Jackie Kay’s 1998 Trumpet, in which a transgender jazz musician’s assigned sex is exposed after his death, sending his son into a masculinity crisis. Irvine Welsh’s 1998 Filth, in which a drug-addled corrupt cop dresses up as his estranged wife to do murders. Louise Welsh’s 2002 The Cutting Room, in which a gay auctioneer recruits a burly transvestite drug-dealer to help figure out what’s going on with some pornographic photographs. (There’s an amazing scene featuring contributors to the Tartan Skirt.) Luke Sutherland’s 2004 Venus as a Boy, in which a genderqueer saint can orgasmically heal people with a touch and gradually turns into a gold statue. Ali Smith’s 2007 Girl Meets Boy, in which a non-binary rebel begins the revolution against the partiarchy in Inverness. Please tell me if I’ve missed any.
I don’t cite these authors to condemn them. I’m completely uninterested in a moralistic analysis of these novels’ failings in how they depict their trans subjects. I respect all of these writers as artists and many of them as contemporary allies. However, these are the authors who shaped my reading and writing when I was a teenager, so it’s important to me to understand how their ideas about transness shaped the literary world in which I work.
It’s also worth adding a caveat to what I mean by “trans” here. As should be obvious from the brief summaries, few of these plots bear any relation to actually-existing trans life: they’re almost all parodic, magical, implausible, horrifying or otherwise reality-detached. When I say “trans”, I don’t mean that these characters necessarily bear much relation to the contemporary transgender identity category. Rather, I mean that they’re symbols of sexual instability, that they use aspects of actually-existing transness to talk about something else. Something weird. Something Scottish.
To understand what’s going on, I want to introduce three theoretical concepts: the gender novel, the cis gaze, and the trans reveal.
Casey Plett coined “the gender novel” to talk about “a very twenty-first-century sub-genre: sympathetic novels about transition by people who haven’t transitioned.” She talks about the way non-transitioning authors use trans stories for aesthetic reasons that have little to do with the reality of trans lives:
Gender Novels fail to communicate what it’s actually like to transition. Their portrayals of gender-identity struggles are ham-fisted, and despite the authors’ apparently good intentions they often rehash stale, demeaning tropes: a coy mix-and-match of pronouns; descriptions of trans women as fake and mannish; the equation of gender with genitalia and surgery; a fixation on rare intersex conditions that allow for tacked-on, unrealistic transition narratives.
Plett suggests that these North American novels use trans stories to retell a settler-colonial literary cliché. The Gender Novel “idealizes a very particular kind of struggle” in which “[e]ach protagonist is a chosen one, a lone wolf plodding on against adversity” and in which “each novel ends with a character gazing, literally or figuratively, into the unknowable distance”. These sexual misfits struggle against a hostile world for self-acceptance and reach the open vistas of unsettled land. I’m suggesting that Scottish literature has its own earlier period of the gender novel – less sympathetic and more grotesque – in which trans stories are also used to retell national myths.
An important way these novels work is through their use of the “cis gaze”, which McKenzie Wark calls (in a discussion of Lote by Scottish trans writer Shola von Reinhold) “a looking that harbors anxiety about the slippages and transformations between genders, but which also harbors desires for those transitions as well”. The cis gaze is scared of us, but it wants us. It’s exciting not to know what we are, then exciting to find out. This makes the gaze “dominating, controlling, and yet fragile”. The cis gaze tries to make trans self-authorship impossible by defining the terms in which we must work, but it also keeps falling apart into its own transness. In a national context, the cis gaze ossifies into “the cis state”, which Jules Gill-Peterson calls “a strategy of state power that defines citizenship through an obligatory alignment of physical anatomy with legal gender markers and visual appearance”. The cis state paranoiacally defines and polices the borders in which trans people must live. I’m suggesting that national literature is one of the expressions of the cis state, a place where anxieties about transness are explored and where cis solutions are both undermined and reaffirmed. Dominating, controlling, and yet fragile.
The last idea I want to introduce is probably the most important: the trans reveal. This is the moment when a previously-hidden trans character is exposed: the vomit scene in The Crying Game (and Ace Ventura). Danielle M. Seid calls this “a moment in a trans person’s life when the trans person is subjected to the pressures of a pervasive gender/sex system that seeks to make public the ‘truth’ of the trans person’s gendered and sexed body”.
When used as a narrative technique in literature and film, the reveal presents previously “hidden” or unknown information to the audience, often in a manner that twists the plot or produces a climax. […] This reveal is often highly sensationalized, dramatized, or eroticized.
The trans reveal is really old. The quote I used at the top of this blog is from the Older Scots edition of The Book of the Seven Sages, a major early modern compendium of fables. Its frame story – in the Scottish edition, but curiously not in the English – climaxes when the queen’s maid is stripped and proved to be “really” a man, which also proves that the queen herself is lying about rape. (This plot beat also turns up in the more famous Roman de Silence.) The queen and the maid are killed; the Emperor’s falsely-accused son inherits the throne. The trans reveal here is the narrative climax, unveiling wider truths, initiating lethal violence, and restoring patriarchal state order.
The trans reveal is also really persistent. In the 2025 Academy Awards, two winners used a trans reveal at the climax: in Emilia Pérez, a tragic trans reveal kills the protagonists; in Conclave, a comic trans reveal resolves the conflicts of the Catholic church. I burst out laughing at both scenes. Sorry not sorry if my spoilers deny you the giggles. The surgery musical sequence is still great. Anyway, in all of these texts, 16th and 21st century, as Seid has it, “The moment of the reveal provokes a struggle over the meaning of the trans body, a struggle in which the trans person often “loses” to dominant discourses about trans lives.”
What I’m doing here is a sort of trans reveal of my own. Against a situation where the transness of the literature of Scottish devolution has barely been acknowledged,1 I’m revealing what was trans all along. If the cis gaze has tried to obscure and evacuate the transness of Scottish literature, my trans reading exposes these books and fills them with trans meaning.
The next installment is going to look at the trans devils in The Mermaids Singing, The Wasp Factory and Filth, monstrous figures who expose the worst cis fears about trans people. After that, I’ll look at the trans angels in Venus as a Boy, The Warlock of Strathearn and Girl Meets Boy, who are called on to save cis people from themselves. Then, to conclude, I’ll return to the old Scottish literary cliché of the Caledonian antisyzygy, the idea that Scottish literature is characterised by a central split between opposing principles, Gaelic and Scots, Highland and Lowland, natural and intellectual, female and male. One of the things that I think is going on is that the literature of Scottish devolution – that moment when Scotland’s split political identity finally resolves to do something to change the situation – is revivifying the cliché of the antisyzygy through trans fantasies, imagining futures for Scotland through whether trans characters live, die or transcend. If the later American gender novels retell heroic myths of individual triumph and self-becoming, Scottish gender novels are anxious fantasies of hope and defeat.
I might manage this in three more installments, or it might take a wee bit longer. I hope you’ll stick with me for the journey. I hope, too, you’ll make use of these ideas: argue with them, expand them, take them further. This work is a beginning, not a conclusion. The best thing that could happen would be for trans writers in Scotland to continue to move beyond these ideas entirely, so that we can have a confident, weird and polyphonic literature of our own.
Many thanks to Elizabeth Elliott for the original invitation and for organising the event this week. Thanks to to Jane Bonsall for introducing me to the Seven Sages material and for her original research, which I reference here. And thanks to everyone to whom I’ve ranted about all this for the past two years.
What I’m Doing
On March 4th at 5pm I’ll be at the University of Aberdeen, talking the chapter this blog is based on, with responses from Mae Diansangu, Domenico di Rosa (University of Glasgow), and Moth McGowan (University of Aberdeen). It’s in person and also online.
On March 22nd I’ll be helping my pals launch a new pay-what-you-can book stall on the Portobello prom.
What I’ve Read
Igiaba Scego’s Adua opens up ways of writing about violence.
Crìsdean MacIllebhàin’s Athair / Father holds both its skill and its subject with painful delicacy.
Shon Faye’s Love in Exile helped me understand why my yearning feels so confusing.
I’d really love to be wrong about this, so please tell me if you know of an earlier synthesis on this subject. Whyte’s Gendering the Nation (1995) is a forerunner in the analysis of Scottish literature in terms of gender and sexuality, though the material largely predates my period. Carroll’s Transgender and the literary imagination (2022) contextualises the trans literature of devolution, through Trumpet, within 20th century Anglophone trans literature. Many of the novels discussed here are referenced in Vakoch and Sharp’s The Routledge Handbook of Trans Literature (2024) within a broad trans studies lens, but are not analysed as Scottish. Some studies, such as Macdonald’s Antiheroes and Androgynes (2007), compare two of these authors through a trans lens, and there are numerous individual studies, but I have been otherwise unable to find a broader synthesis that pays attention to the whole trend.