Since it’s Pride Month, why not three recent reads by transgender authors?
They are — the first two novels of the Erin McCabe Legal Thriller series, By Way of Sorry (2021, USA) and Survivor’s Guilt (2022, USA), by Robyn Gigl, and Detransition, Baby (2022, USA) by Torrey Peters.
Erin McCabe is a defence lawyer in New Jersey. She is one half of a law partnership with Duane ‘Swish’ Swisher, an ex-FBI agent. She is also a transgender woman — and transitioned after she’d built herself a career in her assigned gender. So the fact she’s transgender is known to pretty much everyone.
In By Way of Sorrow, a title that feels like it meant more in early drafts than it does in the finished book, McCabe is asked to represent a transgender sex worker who murdered the son of a senator. It all seems very cut-and-dried: he took her to a motel room, she stabbed him to death. All the evidence indicates as much. Claiming self-defence would be a hard sell — except… As McCabe and Swisher investigate, it becomes apparent the senator’s son had murdered several sex workers previously. And it had been hushed up.
The senator is about to mount a gubernatorial campaign, and the revelation his son was a serial killer would — obviously — torpedo his career. So he uses his contacts to force a quick verdict in the case. And when that doesn’t work, he hires people to first intimidate, and then try to kill, those involved. Including McCabe.
As crime novel plots go, particularly ones centred on lawyers, it’s all a bit over-the-top. Law & Order this is not. The conspiracy to get the conviction done as quickly as possible soon involves people from the state legislature down to beat cops. Everyone, it seems, is out to stop McCabe.
Meanwhile, McCabe is trying to reconnect with her family after her transition. And deal with transphobia in her profession. It’s worth noting the story is set in 2006 — not 2021, the year it was published. I’m not entirely sure why. Perhaps that’s when Gigl originally wrote the novel, and it’s taken fifteen years to see print... However, I think it more likely the year was a deliberate choice, because things were somewhat simpler then for professional transgender women. These days, the US Christian right actively promotes hate against transgender people, as does the right-wing press on both sides of the Atlantic. With the help of their TERF stooges, who seem to have no problem aligning themselves with neo-nazis and anti-semites, they’ve campaigned against healthcare and human rights for trans people. It’s not about protecting the rights of women, it’s about rolling back the rights of women. They’ve already overturned Roe v Wade and outlawed abortion in many states in the US, now they’re claiming on social media women should not have careers but keep house instead — one “meme”, allegedly quoting a woman, claimed “female hormones were better suited to baking”, for fuck’s sake.
But the books… McCabe’s life and career would likely be very different in the 2020s. I get that Gigl wants McCabe to be a positive role model (admittedly, in some aspects, she’s a little too good to be true). And so she is. Gigl, a transgender woman and lawyer herself, is writing what she knows, inspired and informed by her own lived experience. The author’s bio also suggests some of the family elements of McCabe’s fictional life echo those of Gigl’s own life.
The title of Survivor’s Guilt, the second book in the series, is more related to the plot than that of the first book. A prominent businessman is murdered, and in a secret recording of the murder the victim identifies his daughter as the killer. She is arrested, claims innocence… and then abruptly changes her plea to guilty. There’s no evidence actually tying her to the murder, she has an alibi, although it’s weak, and not many are convinced she murdered him, but, again, powerful forces behind the scene are pushing for a quick conviction. McCabe is brought in when the daughter turns out to be transgender. Things go from bad to worse as, yet again, the villains of the piece decide the best way to resolve the mess is to kill everyone involved. Including McCabe. Apparently, the dead businessman and his friends were involved in underage sex trafficking. They have an enormous fortune stashed in offshore bank accounts, which they can no longer access. Because the dead man’s real daughter, who was abused by him as a child, and disappeared several years before, has returned to take her revenge.
The plots of both books follow a common arc— McCabe is asked to represent a transgender client in prison, nothing about the alleged crime is as it seems, McCabe manages to derail the prosecution’s case, often putting her own life at risk in the process, all the while attempting to rebuild her family and professional relationships after her transition… and eventually wins her client’s freedom. It would be churlish to complain the plots are formulaic — that is, after all, the nature of the genre. But the cast are interesting and sympathetic, and Gigl handles them well.
Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters, on the other hand, is a very different type of novel. It’s set in the trans community in New York, and centres around three people: a trans woman; her ex-lover, who has since detransitioned back to his assigned gender; and his boss, a cis woman, with whom he’s in a relationship and who is now pregnant (and he’s the father).
Reese is a well-known figure in New York’s trans scene. She used to be in a relationship with Amy, who had moved to the city from the Midwest shortly after transitioning — in a relationship, that is, when Reese wasn’t seeing her rich married boyfriend, who treated her like shit. But Amy’s and Reese’s relationship imploded, not helped by the boyfriend beating up Amy, and so Amy detransitioned and became Ames.
Ames’s boss is Katrina, and she’s pregnant. She doesn’t really want a child, and Ames doesn’t think he’ll make a good father. On the other hand, Reese has always wanted a baby, but she probably isn’t fit to be a mother. What if, Ames suggest, the three of them form a family to raise the child?
Detransition, Baby skips between the three main protagonists, and back and forth in the lives of Reese and Ames/Amy. None of them are convinced Ames’s plan will work, although the more they get into it — buying baby clothes, planning for the future — the more they become invested in the idea of their family. Of course, it soon begins to fall apart. Katrina adopts queer sensibilities, but her friends think she’s lost her mind. Reese torpedoes pretty much everything through a combination of insecurity and arrogance— even taking up again with her rich married boyfriend (I think it was the same one who assaulted Amy, but I wasn’t entirely sure). Ames is still not convinced he’s father material, and often wonders if his detransition was actually a mistake.
This is nothing like the Erin McCabe books. They’re legal thrillers with a transgender protagonist, who must rebuild her personal and professional life after her transition, while dodging bullets and delivering closing statements. Peters’s novel is set in a trans community and the trans way of life. McCabe has only family and friends in her support network, and the only other trans people she meets are the ones she ends up representing. Almost all of the main cast in Detransition, Baby is trans.
By definition, Detransition, Baby is a more… entertaining novel than By Way of Sorrow and Survivor’s Guilt — which is not so say I didn’t enjoy the latter. But in Peters’s novel, the cast feel considerably more real than McCabe and her (perhaps a little bit pantomime) villains. Of course, the two authors are writing in different modes of fiction, and while my taste inclines more toward Detransition, Baby, Gigl makes good use of the conventions of her genre — more than that, she seamlessly weaves in the aftermath of her protagonist’s transition, without jeopardising her thriller plots.
I admit, when it comes to crime fiction I only really like three types: contemporary crime fiction with female protagonists by female writers (Paretsky, Grafton), California noir (Chandler, Hammett), and the occasional historical crime fiction. Gigl’s novels fall into the first category, and while Gigl is no Sara Paretsky — although their politics are probably similar — there’s enough in her two novels to date to keep me involved.
As for Detransition, Baby — yes, New York, the US in fact, is a foreign country to me. I have some familiarity with it, thanks to US TV, films and books (and, indeed, even US science fiction novels tell you a lot about the country and the sensibilities of its population; well, perhaps historical sensibilities in sf’s case). Peters’s novel is also set in a community just as “foreign” to me as the US. I’ve read fiction by LGBT+ authors — genre and mainstream — before… and I’m reminded of the Bending the Landscape genre anthologies published in the late 1990s, initially by White Wolf Publishing and then by The Overlook Press, and edited by Nicola Griffith and Stephen Pagel. There were three volumes: Bending the Landscape: Fantasy (1997, USA), Bending the Landscape: Horror (1997, USA) and Bending the Landscape: Science Fiction (1998, USA). The anthologies had a simple remit: genre authors would write LGBT+ genre stories, and LGBT+ authors would write LGBT+ genre stories. The results were generally good, and introduced me to several authors I continued to read. I recommend them, if you can find copies.
But my point here is sort of like the difference between Gigl and Peters. Both writers are transgender women, and both writers’ books have transgender women as major characters. But. Gigl is, I think, more writing from a genre perspective, despite her extensive activism for the LGBT+ community. Which reminds me of genre authors writing LGBT+ genre stories in the Bending the Landscape anthologies — although, of course, Erin McCabe is based on Gigl’s own lived experience…
I thought Detransition, Baby the best book of the three, much as I thought the LGBT+ authors generally provided the better stories in the Bending the Landscape anthologies. Which suggests writing from a genre perspective is perhaps more likely to be limiting than simply writing down genre lines. But perhaps Detransition, Baby is sui generis, so genre arguments make no sense. It’s an amusing, well-written and fascinating novel. I recommend it. I also recommend the two Gigl novels, but with the caveat that fans of legal thrillers would probably enjoy them the most.
Both authors have new books out later this year — the third Erin McCabe novel, Remain Silent (2023, USA), is currently available in hardback in the US; and a collection of four novellas by Peters, Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones (2023, USA), is due later in the year.
