 Good evening and welcome to Downstream Navarra Media's interview series about all things politics, culture and political culture. Tonight I will be joined by Julia Jakes who is a longtime friend of Navarra Media and author of Trans A Memoir and tonight we will be talking about her new book Variations which I really must abuse my position as host and say it's great you should go out and you should get it and you should recommend it to all your friends as well Julia welcome. Hi thanks for having me and your your nails match the cover of the book I don't know if you've done the other hand pink but um I mean I don't actually have pink nail polish and it also doesn't suit me so I only get like you only get like one half of the trans flag you know the bit that suits my coloring um thank you so much for joining us and thank you at home for joining us as well if you are new to our content here on Navarra Media hit subscribe you can get a lot more from us that way and do let us know your thoughts in the comments below. This collection of short stories variations has just come out and personally I think it's really great it's really tender it's just this really beautiful immersive experience and it takes the reader on a journey from mid 19th century up to the present day through letters and diary entries and fragments from screenplays and blog posts in order to weave stories of trans experiences through snapshots of British cultural life and it just does the amazing work of breathing so much life and humanity into police records and all this kind of you know archival flotsam and jetsam um and takes on this journey from Victorian theaters to the British punk scene um Belfast, Cardiff, Liverpool, London, Manchester and there is just so much in here for literally anyone who is interested in our cultural history so just a really basic question Julia how did you come to write this like where did the idea start? Yeah that's uh that's a really interesting question a beautiful summary of the book thank you um I mean I wrote a lot of short fiction in my teens and early 20s and increasingly found myself putting trans characters into those stories at that time I knew I was trans I hadn't started transitioning yet I didn't really quite know what my gender identity was and writing was a way of exploring it and as a 2021 year old I wrote a couple of short stories with trans characters at their center one was about a young male to female cross dresser who decides they want to make themselves a work of art and so goes to a fairly old-style drag bar dressed as um a Russian film star from the early 20th century called Alan Nazimov and the other was a short story called The Invented Pass of Marina which had two narratives on the left and right sides of the page and the left side was a fairly banal uh dinner parties or bourgeois dinner party conversation like the ones I often have with my family where Marina is just being asked about her family and her background and where she went to school and all of this and it's basically because she's trying not to be read as transsexual she's trying to pass is um giving this back story that she's had to make up and the whole encounter is really really stressful um so from there I sort of it made me realize that actually all the queer authors I've been reading sort of Jean Genet, Jean Cocteau, William Burroughs um they didn't really have an awful lot of space for trans characters although there were some cross dresses in their writing and through my 20s I discovered these South American uh gay male authors like Severo Sardoy and Kopi who did make a bit more space for trans characters and cross dresses and and so forth and this may be realized that a literature like a trans literature probably was possible and I wanted to have a go at helping to create it. I had a go at writing these stories between 2005 and 2007 and at that time I didn't really have the life experience to create plausible trans non-binary characters but also the theoretical uh and sort of intellectual and political background that I needed didn't really exist I mean there were some uh transgender studies or trans theory in the US people like Kate Bornstein, Leslie Feinberg, Sandy Stone, Susan Stryker but I hadn't really found my way to a lot of that yet and there was still quite a lot of work being done in the 2000s and early 2010s around so trans and non-binary theory and organizing and representation and literature um so I came back to this project in 2015 having written my transgender journey series for The Guardian to set up blog posts detailing the um NHS uh as they called it gender reassignment process and then trans and memoir which came out in 2015 which was an expansion on that column and uh Ash you said at the start I was a long time friend of the show and of course I first met you when we did a Navara show uh on trans and memoir in 2015. Yeah and it's because I wanted to get you to talk about football mostly I remember like getting you on the radio and I was like you think we're here to talk about gender and you know trans issues but I want you to talk to me about football Julia. Well well there was a lovely football conversation in that show um a really great football conversation that show I remember but um maybe today is it's not the best time for football discourse but um too soon too soon. There is actually one reference to a to an actual individual football player in variations and special prize for the first person who writes in and names that football but um yeah I mean after 2015 uh I I really wanted to go back to this short story project it was sort of still so something I really wanted to do and that was when I really hit on the idea of giving this this idea of just a set of short stories about the variety of trans lives lifestyles politics history hit on the idea of using it to kind of cover a history of trans people in Britain from the Victorian period to the present I've read Susan Stryker's book Transgender History which came out in 2008 and Stryker posits the development of trans identities and culture and politics starting off with the um industrial revolution this allowed people to break the sort of feudal bonds with their families and local communities move to the city and have a bit more anonymity um so that happens in the 19th century really um and in Victorian London there are a number of cases of male to female cross-dressers being arrested by the police and put on trial and that the first story a night of the theater in variations covers that then there is a process of legislation there's a very high profile trial of the cross-dressers Ernest or Stella Bolton and Frederick or Fanny Park in 1871 and they're put on trial for six days um and basically the trial collapses when the court realizes they haven't really got anything on the books that they can charge them with the judge is summing up basically says look we'd love to do you for this but we haven't got anything so we're going to have to let you go but we really should look into doing something about this uh and obviously 14 years later you get the criminal law amendment act which makes gross indecency between two um adult men public or private consenting or not um punishable with two years imprisonment with hard labor which of course what does for Oscar Wilde and the second story is called a woman of no importance and that's set around the Oscar Wilde trial obviously from there you get the development of sexology to um counter this stigmatization and criminalization uh and through sexology and that's explored in the third story and through the development of sexology you get things like the creation of these labels transsexual and transvestite and then these other identity categories and then the kind of politics and culture that forms around them so that a lot of the rest of the book is is sort of obliquely exploring that I mean it kind of seems to me that one of the things that the book tracks is this kind of consolidation of language around a notion of identity body and self-hood as opposed to behaviors which are considered deviant or dangerous or degenerate in some way um one of the things I guess I really wanted to ask is why for exploring that process of languaging developing and then also languaging emerging in a kind of self-ownership so it's not just what is the label that is attached to trans and gender non-conforming people but what are the labels that people generate for themselves um why was fiction the best way for you to explore that because I'm always interested particularly for writers like you as well why didn't you write a history book why didn't you write a piece of non-fiction yeah that's that's a really interesting question thank you and one that obviously gave a lot of thought to in this project I did actually try to write a non-fiction trans history of Britain um about 10 years ago and I saw stuff looking at the Victorian period uh there's there's a sort of post-modern approach to history that says that you can't transpose labels onto people who preceded them um and if you look at any kind of queer history there's often quite a lot of double think around that concept I'm a big fan for example of Hugh Lemme and Ben Miller's podcast Bad Gays where you know they endlessly kind of qualify anyone who predated the late 19th century idea of the homosexual by saying look you can't transpose these concepts onto people who preceded them but come on and this post-modern approach often sort of intersects with plain old-fashioned prejudice that just says look you know you people have no past you shouldn't really exist in the present and any attempt to say well look here are proto trans individuals tends to be kind of torn down but I thought fiction might be more interesting and more productive partly because it's an interesting way of edging around that particular problem and doing something quite playful and exciting and fun with it which was you know using my own subjectivity and experience of trans living and that of the you know many many trans and non-binary people that my life and my work has brought me into contact with over the last sort of 10 or 15 years and just seeing okay well these these male to female cross-dressers in 1840s London that I've read about um if I do this as fiction I don't have to lay with them as anything I can just get inside their heads and say well you know what would it have been like to walk the street and being trying to pass and knowing how high the stakes are just for going to the theatre as a woman for one night um so that was one thing to do but also it felt to me that actually a lot of this history is already out there um and you know we are still waiting for somebody to corollate into a a book hopefully a definitive non non-fiction history of trans and non-binary people in Britain uh Christine Burns edited a volume called Trans Britain a few years ago which is a multi-authored uh collection and I guess that's another problem with the non-fiction history at this point is that if someone were to write a non-fiction trans history of Britain you know who is writing that I mean yes I'm a trans woman but like you know I'm fairly middle class um you know I'm I'm white and all the rest of it I already have a media platform I haven't noticed I would be writing that from uh from a position of relative privilege and certainly within the community um so I mean that was that was an issue and I think maybe at this point multi-authored non-history uh non-fiction volumes are um are a better choice but it also sort of struck me like there's very very little um fiction by trans and non-binary people about trans and non-binary people and vanishingly little in Britain there's um Ross Kaveny's uh book Tiny Pieces of Skull um and still not an awful lot else so it struck me as you know interesting to try and write something that could maybe provide a sort of a bit of a springboard for for British trans fiction uh but also I've done my memoir and I've done all this journalism and short fiction is really where my heart is um it's the thing I enjoy writing the most uh when you take away any consideration about you know making money from writing and trying to earn a living uh this is this is the type of writing I I like the most and have always wanted to do um we've got a comment from Sylla Fane in the chat who says Juliet's book Trans a Memoir was great and really insightful we'll be reading her new book she should definitely read her new book um and just just following on I guess this discussion of you know or why fiction one of the things I guess I wanted to ask you was do you consider this a work of historical fiction or better yet historical fictions because when I was reading it I kept thinking about that quality that Frederick Jameson identifies um which is that realism comes from sensory perceptions which are more about rooting the work in a kind of bodily physical emotive reality rather than simply appearing appealing to the intellect and going I've got all my dates exactly right so I was just wondering if that was something in terms of getting inside people's heads and and writing that kind of emotional bodily life that was maybe because you were thinking well that's the kind of historical fiction I want to do it's interesting I mean you if you're going to write fiction you need to create a world and you need to have strong feelings about the world that you create and you know the two different things I needed to have strong feelings about were trans and non-binary people in Britain um you know through through the ages but also each historical period that I wrote about and each historical period that I do write about is a period that I find incredibly interesting and all of them are maybe periods in which I would have liked to have sampled adult life and seen what it was like so there's two stories in the 19th century set in the 1840s and the 1890s there's a story set in the interwar period that's mostly the late 1920s that spans into the 30s and then there's a story set in 1939 and then after that there's a story in the 1950s and then every decade up to the 2010s so in all of them you know I have spent a lot of time being interested in and consuming you know some of the cultural product so British literature film were appropriate being interested in things like pop music and football going back you know through all of the post-war period and and further an interest in political history as well and of course I was really trying to make sure that I brought historical accuracy to bear in terms of the political and cultural context in which all of the characters are operating which did mean knowing quite a lot about political history more widely in cultural history and and not just the sort of lgb and particularly t history of the time but yeah of course it was really important to actually inhabit those characters and to think with each of them well look what would have been legally and socially possible for them as trans people where over time there was greater freedom what were the pitfalls of that what were the contradictions they were trying to work within you know what what are the forces shaping shaping their trans lives basically and trying to bring some empathy to that's always kind of thinking well how would I have responded to this how would other trans people I know have responded to this I mean it seemed to me that like one of the things that I thought was a kind of common thread where like there were so many moments where characters were looking for permission to transgress and so it was a way of reading other people's behaviors for those signals of is this a safe place for me to transgress according to what's legally and socially permissible and looking for those signals from people in a way which is kind of a silent recognition and I was wondering if maybe you could talk me through that because it struck me as being both very watchful but gentle and empathetic rather than kind of paranoid and surveilling that that mode of watching I mean that process you're talking about yeah I think that's that's true I think a lot of these stories are about people struggling to keep control of their own narratives and whether their stories are being basically taken away from them by the media or by sexologists or by the law it's it's yeah that's that's definitely a running theme I mean it might be interesting to talk about that with regards to one specific story which is one of my favorites which is is called a woman of no importance actually talk about it with two because there's there's two that I think are particularly interesting how you want you know I'm just mindful of time in a woman of no importance this is the story of a 20 something kind of writer who moves from Manchester to London partly because they want to immerse themselves in this literary culture around Oscar Wilde and the yellow book which was a sort of decadent literary publication actually Wilde really hated but published in London in the 1890s and illustrated by Robert Beardsley and others and so once to immerse themselves in that literary circle would also discover this kind of queer underworld in London that they can be a part of and maybe explore a kind of cross dressing culture and this is sort of narrated by an outsider someone who knew Arthur Parr and writes the events 20 years later and you know recounts them in a way that sort of says look I always knew that Parr had the sort of insatiable desire to to cross dress and to do so reasonably openly and that this was always going to lead to disaster and the narrator is how talking you through that that process so so there's something about taking the point of view away from the character and having it observed from the outside by somebody who is trying to write against the kind of gross and decency laws and also against obscenity laws in publication and then the the fifth story is called Dancing with the Devil and that's set in the 1950s and it's written as a chapter from an inventive memoir by a transsexual model an actor called Laura Miller who is based to some extent on people like April Ashley and Roberta Cahill kind of some of the first public transsexual women in Britain and in that case she is trying to build a career in modeling and film she has you know slept with some people who obviously know that she's transsexual but the media have gotten onto this and they're trying to out her and then in the story she and her boyfriend who is a trans man again based on some real life historical figures are both trying to find a way to stop her and indeed them both being outed so in both cases yeah you have you have people being watched and trying to deal with with being watched and I think in a lot of the stories yes the characters are trying to deal with the sort of cisgender gaze and the sort of hostility of that and in some ways they're trying to hide from it in some ways they're sort of embracing it or trying to turn it to their advantage but towards the end of the collection I think the last two stories in particular are set in the 21st century one in Brighton and one in Belfast and in both cases they feature characters who are trying to work within a sort of trans and non-binary community in both cases communities they sort of created themselves to some extent because they've had to but seeing seeing what happens to them differently when they they're not having to kind of presume that all the people they're talking to are not just not trans but are actively hostile to them and I think something quite interesting happens there as well. We've got another comment Max Holloway in the chat says variations arrived yesterday and I can't wait to get started well you know that way too long just soon this interview is done crack it open mate you're gonna love it just just moving the conversation forward a little bit we've put in the thumbnail of the show fighting transphobia with art and I wanted to sort of get your sense on where the culture is at right now however it however you wanted to find culture because that's obviously huge because on the one hand there is obviously this huge shift in terms of the visibility of trans and non-binary identities people representing those identities in the arts and in popular culture and and sure like some of the ways in which this can be done and like a kind of you know Netflix special can be a bit clunky and a bit cringe but but it's happening it's culture trying to make a gesture of recognition and then you've got this reactionary backlash which to me seems most vociferous where it emerges from you know the self-appointed liberal center so I was wondering if you could just talk me through a bit your observations of that divide between I guess almost popular culture political culture you know new generation you know gatekeepers of liberal opinion that kind of thing yeah well I mean I tried to explore this through the final story of the book which is called tipping point and it's all about a blogger in Belfast reacting to Time magazine's famous tipping point article of May 2014 the one with Laverne Cox on the cover and the title The Transgender Tipping Point arguing that this sort of trans civil rights movement at least in the US had reached a sort of level of visibility and organization which meant it could no longer be kind of ignored or stopped and it was going to be an important force in US and indeed global politics of course in a lot of mainstream media and mainstream politics that tipping point was sort of taken as a challenge and I think there's a sort of liberal conception of history that sort of says that freedoms gradually unfold and once they've they've rolled out it's they can't really be properly rolled back and then a more radical conception of history that talks about having to fight the same battles over and over again and it's very striking that since that tipping point things for trans and non-binary people worldwide have often seem to get worse rather than better in terms of political representation and political media so in Britain you've seen a real transphobic turn in centrist media and I would actually I would differentiate between centrism and liberalism you know centrism is there's a lot more authoritarian I think and a lot more generationally situated within the over 45s in this country I think sort of 45 to 60 age bracket which is where pretty much all of the most vociferous anti trans commentators in this country is their age group I think we don't need to sit here naming them we'd be here all night but I you know so in Britain there has been this sort of real media pushed back against trans visibility and trans rights at an assistance that all conversations take place on the worst possible terms so both you know any public conversation that trans people are invited into will have to be about the validity of our identities and we just ask to endlessly argue about that rather than trying to advocate our sort of social and political needs or indeed advocate the culture that we're creating and this is you know fed into someone like Liz Truss floating possibly quite regressive legislation about trans identities and which public spaces were allowed to enter into and so forth obviously you've seen the Trump administration in the US and you know four years of really trying to create a hostile environment for trans people there as possible and in a lot of American states you know Republican bills to ban trans people from bathrooms and so forth the Bolsonaro regime in Brazil very anti-LGBT generally Victor Orban's regime in Hungary like retroactive stripping gender recognition from people in Romania banning gender studies from universities anti-LGBT climate in Poland for example so and there are other examples as well so there has been this real kind of backlash against trans visibility but also yes I mean you know if you look at something like Netflix for all the problems with you know sort of corporate corporatization of LGBT culture and sort of rainbow capitalism and all the rest of it you know is offering a sort of globally accessible and you know sometimes pretty good and you know interesting and inventive and informative range of programming documentary and you know feature and tv series narratives about trans and non-binary lives and you know this is this is why I'm I'm not completely pessimistic about this stuff I mean just to wrap up on that I was at the the the trans rights demo in London last summer about a year ago when when Liz Truss or whoever it was had leaked these proposals to the Times and you know I got this demo I actually started crying because I just you know my friend said how do you think this is going to go and I said well look they've got the Conservative Party on their side you know the Labour Party equivocating on this issue quite a lot you know all of the mainstream media and we've just got asked we've just got these like few hundred people who've come to Parliament Square and are just you know desperately trying to stop this horrendous piece of legislation going through and it didn't go through you know I mean we did I don't think I'd say we won that but we didn't lose either so you know I kind of feel over time you know the the uses of this this cultural representation will be you know along with actually people just meeting real life trans and non-binary individuals the uses of this representation will be to build empathy for people and of course to help people to come out I mean the things that helped me to understand myself as a teenager in the ages of section 28 was kind of watching films and seeking out memoirs and and these kind of like these these queer writers I mentioned earlier so I think culture is is hugely powerful in that way in ways that aren't always necessarily obvious or easy to quantify but hugely important I mean I want to kind of get deeper into questions of representation in just a bit but I suppose one of the things I want to ask is when you have I think a shift within culture that's happening faster than the shift within politics or even you've got a kind of regressive backwards movement in politics do you think that kind of explains the kind of you know death scream of you know centrism which is this awful sense that maybe young people will be doing things differently the ways in which they always have done but you know might go actually you are no longer the arbiter of what a reasonable amount of freedom is that's going to be taken out of your hands yeah I mean I think you know obviously a lot of British politics over the last kind of five to ten years can be explained generationally and you know the frustration of younger people economically that you know they're going to be a lot worse off than than their parents were and they're going to be saddled with you know huge student like debt from tuition fees or it's going to be impossible for them to ever own a house or hold down a steady career or anything but also yeah coupled with I think yeah like a different set of values you know growing up you know whereas I grew up with something like section 28 that behind the quote unquote promotion of homosexuality in in schools and public libraries and so forth you know anyone under the age of sort of 30 now wouldn't really remember a world without social media or barely let alone without the internet so you know I think there is just a very different conversation that's been taking place amongst like millennials and people younger than that and yeah I mean a lot of centrism is about cultural gatekeeping and I think you know a lot of centrism like I said it's very much amongst the sort of 45 to 60 age bracket and people who can't let go of their youth and just sort of can't conceive of the fact that they are not at the cutting edge of politics or culture anymore and just won't admit it let alone you know move aside you know maybe things have moved on since Moby do you know what I mean just let it go yeah I mean people yeah you know it's hard to imagine people getting outraged about someone putting all of their songs in an advert now I mean no one cares about that anymore but but but yeah I mean you know the inability of this country to really move beyond the 1990s has has been has been kind of infuriating yeah I mean we'll see I mean surely that has to happen sooner or later but who knows when I don't know enough for guardians anything to do with it I mean I want to talk maybe and kind of start quibbling with with notions of recognition because it seems to me that of course you have these explosive movements be it Black Lives Matter or the kind of increased visibility of demands for trans rights but a lot of the time these demands can get pulled through the kind of master frame of wanting to be seen and see yourself reflected in mainstream culture and so I was thinking about this this kind of emphasis on recognition and how this question of who is recognized and acknowledges become so potent in recent years because it plays out in all kinds of different ways you know on the one hand you know marginalized people saying I want to see myself in mainstream culture this mainstream culture which I consume so much of right you have this huge expansion of pop culture over the last few decades as well and it's that demand to wants to see yourself in it but then there's also the flip side of that which is the kind of trans exclusionary moral panic around you know women being erased from gender neutral language and kind of you know framing the demand for trans exclusion in the language of feminism and and women's rights and so I suppose I wanted to just sort of ask do you perceive a kind of flip side or a dangerous second edge to this kind of status that's allocated to recognition and acknowledgement yeah I mean trans and non-binary theorists have for decades now been talking about visibility as a very double-edged thing you know recognition can be quite dangerous being invisible can be safer and you know with with recognition comes you know just a wider range of people knowing who you are and so how to attack you and whether they want to attack you it's definitely definitely a very very double-edged double-edged sword as as it were and it's something you know I have quite an awkward relationship with I mean you know you sort of mentioned some of the terms on which visibility is offered and that's another thing to think about often the terms on which trans people are offered mainstream visibility are very unfavorable you know whether it's you know back in the 90s you know chat shows like Jerry Springer or or now the fun fights on programs on mainstream television or you know radio they're not they're not so different really for a lot of trans people and non-binary people doing anything creative there's often this question of you know am I going to aim this work at outsiders that cisgender people or broadly at kind of trans and non-binary people and in my work I've tried to kind of short circuit that question a bit and try to find ways of talking to both at the same time and perhaps particularly aiming at like trans people who are not yet hugely politically engaged with sort of trans and non-binary movements and maybe finding a way to sort of bring them in but also being perhaps critical of those movements where where necessary it's a really really complicated question I don't think there's any one correct tactic I think it's it's good that there are some people who can go on kind of mainstream television and explain explain you know the complexities of and nuances of trans and non-binary living in a way that connects with kind of big mainstream audiences and you know I hope it's it's you know I think it's good that there are people writing non-fiction books that are engaging directly with those anti-trans arguments that you're talking about and obviously my tactic is to kind of in this case is to write fiction to try and kind of write around those issues to some extent and also yeah like I said earlier to to try and to try and bring the struggle to a to a new domain which is which is literary fiction I mean look I've got to say I'm really glad that you chose literary fiction because I'm one of those people I do all my best historical learning from fiction and that's just always been the case for me so how did I learn about you know the Wars of the Roses I read Shakespeare how did I learn about slavery I read Beloved how do I learn about the French Revolution or the reign of Henry VIII I read Hilary Mantel it's because it connects with me on that human sensory emotive level which means that details stick and if any of you out there are the same you should get in this fucking book because the details they stuck um thank you so much for talking to me this evening Juliet thank you for your time and thank you for this work it was really enjoyable to read it's always a pleasure Ash and if you have enjoyed this interview give the video a like don't be stingy and make sure you subscribe for more you've been watching downstream on the Vara Media good night