Academic literature on the topic 'Transgender people – Juvenile fiction'

In human society, it is natural to see two genders, male and female. It is somewhat surprising that the work of transgender people, who can be called the third gender, is somewhat surprising. In the Mahabharatam, the story of the birth of a transsexual is extended. In nature's creation, we find these people incarnated as transsexuals in practical life. The records of transgenders can be found in abundance in Sangam literary grammar. Transgender people, who have been marginalized in society, are denied the right to participate in public. Transgenders living in small groups in the human community have been ridiculed as "identityless." This is the situation today. In the Sangam literary records, their identity has been recognized socially. It can be said that their contribution to the level of education is low. Transgenders, who are marginalized people, are more likely to be rejected at all levels. Since they lacked the right to education, there was no context in grammatical and literary fiction in which the pedis (hermaphrodites), the transgenders, could register their right to life. No one comes forward to help in public, fearing that if they raise their voice for them, they will be respected as untouchables in society. This denial is also a contemporary phenomenon. As a result, it is necessary to compile how third-gender identities are recorded in the literary field. Transgenders, also known as hermaphrodites, exist as records in literary life. The location of such people's lives is clearly visible in grammatical and literary fiction.

This article identifies the dominant modes of discourse and critiques the problematic tropes and conventions at work in a selection of contemporary young adult fiction novels about young people with queer gender identities. Beginning with the role of young adult fiction, the importance of resisting models of binary gender, the trope of coming out and the convention of the hero’s journey, this article then analyses transphobic tropes: how the narrative lens of pathos functions in these texts to reduce the queer to a state of victimization, invisibility, mental illness, otherness, isolation and not belonging. This article uses the phrase ‘queer genders’ and the term ‘trans*’ to encompass transgender, non-binary, genderqueer, genderfluid and other gender non-conforming identities. ‘Trans’ without the asterisk is the shortened form of ‘transgender’.

Purpose Recent research finds that youth who identify as transgender or gender-expansive are disproportionately incarcerated in juvenile justice systems and are treated differently from their non-trans peers (Himmelstein and Brückner, 2011; Hunt and Moodie-Mills, 2012; Irvine, 2010; Mitchum and Moodie-Mills, 2014). Juvenile justice systems have paid little attention to this group of young people in terms of their unique service needs and risk factors. Using qualitative methods, the researchers analyze in-depth interviews and focus group findings from formerly incarcerated trans youth in juvenile justice settings to better understand their experiences. This paper aims to examine the challenges for young people, and, as well as considered recommendations for juvenile justice professionals to study toward making changes in policies, practices and programs that are needed to support young people who are transgender or gender expansive. Design/methodology/approach Using qualitative, case examples and descriptive analysis, this paper describes the experiences of trans youth in juvenile justice settings and studies toward developing models of promoting trans-affirming approaches to enhance juvenile justice institutions for trans and gender-expansive youth placed in them. The paper describes the evolution of an approach used by the authors, in New York state juvenile justice settings to increase a trans-affirming perspective as a central role in the organization’s strategy and design, and the methods it is using to institutionalize this critical change. Findings culled from the focus groups and in-depth interviews with 15 former residents of juvenile justice settings and several (3) key staff members from the juvenile justice system, focusing on policies, practices and training models are useful tools for assessing progress and recommending actions to increase the affirming nature of such systems. At its conclusion, this chapter will provide clear outcomes and implications for the development of policies, practices and programs with trans and gender expansive youth in juvenile justice systems. Findings Finding are conceptualized in six thematic categories, namely, privacy, access to health and mental health care, the difference between sexual orientation and gender identity, name and pronoun use, clothing, appearance and mannerism, and housing issues. Research limitations/implications This study is limited as it focuses on formerly incarcerated youth in the New York City area. Practical implications The following implications for practice stemming from this study are as follows: juvenile justice professionals (including judges, defense attorneys, prosecutors, probation officers and detention staff) must treat – and ensure others treat – all trans and gender-expansive youth with fairness, dignity and respect, including prohibiting any attempts to ridicule or change a youth’s gender identity or expression. Having written nondiscrimination and anti-harassment policy is also essential. These policies can address issues such as prohibiting harassment of youth or staff who are trans or gender expansive, requiring the use of respectful and inclusive language and determining how gender rules (e.g. usage of “male or “female” bathrooms, gender-based room assignments) will be addressed for transgender and gender-nonconforming youth. Programs should also provide clients and staff with training and helpful written materials. Juvenile justice professionals must promote the well-being of transgender youth by allowing them to express their gender identity through choice of clothing, name, hair-style and other means of expression and by ensuring that they have access to appropriate medical care if necessary. Juvenile justice professionals must receive training and resources regarding the unique societal, familial and developmental challenges confronting trans youth and the relevance of these issues to court proceedings. Training must be designed to address the specific professional responsibilities of the audience (i.e. judges, defense attorneys, prosecutors, probation officers and detention staff). Juvenile justice professionals must develop individualized, developmentally appropriate responses to the behavior of each trans youth, tailored to address the specific circumstances of his or her or their life. Social implications Providing trans-affirming services to youth in juvenile justice settings is a matter of equity and should be the goal strived for by all systems that care for these young people. Helping trans and gender-expansive youth reenter and reintegrate into society should be a primary goal. There are many organizations and systems that stand ready to assist juvenile justice systems and facilities in supporting trans and gender expansive youth in their custody and helping them to rehabilitate, heal and reenter a society that welcomes their participation and where they can thrive and not just survive. Originality/value The paper is original in that it examines the lived experiences of trans and gender-expansive youth in juvenile justice systems. An area, which has not been fully explored in the professional literature.

Several identity-verifying procedures implemented in the wake of September 11, 2001, created conflicts for transgender people in the US who had different sex designations marked on various forms of identification. Trans studies scholars note that these conflicts highlight the assumption that sex is a stable marker of identity and expose that assumption as a fiction. The use of body scanners in airport security illuminates a similar reliance on binary sex categories. However, identity documentation policies and biometrics in airport security operate through different logics about how to solve the problem of affixing individual identities to changing bodies. The experiences of trans people with both identity documentation and airport security body scanners demonstrate that the requirements for passing as a proper citizen differ depending on the context: identity document policies prioritize medical alteration of the body while biometrics register medical alteration of the body as a potential threat to security.

The image of trans monstrosity has been firmly anchored in mainstream North American popular culture, most notably through films such as Psycho, Dressed to Kill, and The Silence of the Lambs. This cultural vilification has had catastrophic effects on trans communities, stoking violence especially against trans-feminine people, promoting discrimination, and severely affecting trans people’s self-images. By analysing two contemporary short stories, Julian K. Jarboe’s I Am A Beautiful Bug! and A.K. Blue’s God Empress Susanna, this paper examines different approaches to the monster trope from trans perspectives and investigates the entanglements between trans identity, monstrosity, and disability.

The last twenty years have seen a proliferation of books for young people dealing with trans experience and issues. This article charts the emergence of transgender fiction for children and young adults, and its development during that period. It will address several questions arising from this phenomenon. How does the representation of trans experience differ when presented for a child readership rather than adults, and for younger children rather than adolescents? How are the representations of gender identity, gender expression and sexuality affected by considerations of audience? What are the tropes (or clichés) of trans fiction, and how have they changed? Whose points of view do the stories represent? Does it matter whether their authors are themselves trans? Is it more possible today than twenty years ago to assume some knowledge in child readers, or must every story “start from scratch”? There is no single answer to any of these questions, but the article will note some of the trends discernible over a range of texts published in English since the start of the century, and describe some of the challenges in writing texts about trans experience in the future.

The paper analyses the use of community conferencing for young people in various jurisdictions in Australia in the light of its impact in Indigenous communities. It argues that the manner in which these programs have been introduced has ignored Aboriginal rights to self-determination and has grossly simplified Indigenous mechanisms for resolving conflicts. In most jurisdictions, community conferencing has reinforced the role of state police and done little to ensure greater control over police discretionary decision-making. The changes have also been introduced in the context of more punitive law and order policies, including mandatory minimum imprisonment terms and repeat offender legislation for juveniles. The end result is likely to be greater bifurcation of the juvenile justice system along racialised boundaries, with Indigenous youth receiving more punitive outcomes.

Recent decades have witnessed an increase in lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex (LGBTQI) visibility in the British media. Increased representation has not been equally distributed, however, as bisexuality remains an obscured sexual identity in discourses of sexuality. Through the use of diachronic corpus-based critical discourse analysis, this study seeks to uncover how bisexual people have been represented in the British press between 1957 and 2017. By specifically focusing on the discursive construction of bisexuality in The Times, the results reveal how bisexual people are represented as existing primarily in discourses of the past or in fiction. The Times corpus also reveals significant variation in the lexical meaning of bisexual throughout the 60 years in question. These findings contribute to contemporary theories of bisexual erasure which posit that bisexual people are denied the same ontological status as monosexual identities, that is, homosexuality and heterosexuality.

This conceptual article synthesizes the empirical research on punitive environmental norms of schools and the disproportionate effects on certain child and adolescent groups, particularly within urban schools. This involvement has come to be known as the school-to-prison pipeline. The young people affected by harsh school discipline protocols and involved formally with the juvenile courts share a number of common vulnerabilities. A review of these common risk factors that children and adolescents experience is presented first. This is followed by identification of which child and adolescent groups are disproportionately involved in the pipeline: the impoverished, those of color, maltreatment victims, students with special education disabilities, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender.

Scholars have identified policing and hyper-incarceration as key mechanisms to reproduce racial inequality and poverty. Existing research, however, often overlooks how policing practices impact gender and sexuality, especially expansive expressions of gender and non-heterosexuality. This lack of attention is critical because lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people disproportionately experience incarceration, including LGBTQ youth who are disproportionately incarcerated in juvenile detention. In this article, I draw on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork and 40 in-depth interviews with LGBTQ youth experiencing homelessness to address this gap in the literature by documenting how police and other agents of the state use their discretion to regulate youth’s gender expressions, identities, and sex lives. I posit that current policing patterns of discrimination operate primarily not through de jure discrimination against LGBTQ people but as de facto discrimination based on discretionary hyper-incarceration practices that police gender, sexuality, and LGBTQ people. I contend that policing is not only about maintaining racial inequality and governing poverty but also about controlling and regulating gender and sexuality, especially the gender and sexuality of poor LGBTQ people of color.

This project consists of two parts, Section One: Steel Riders, a novel for young adult readers, and Section Two: An Hermeneutical Examination q(Steel Riders. Section One: Steel Riders is a hybrid text based largely on the conventions of the detective novel. The protagonist of Steel Riders is a nineteen-year-old university student, Bella Buchanan, who returns to her home in a small industrial town in regional Western Australia. Bella is disillusioned with her life in the city, but finds that she has become alienated from the life of her peers in her home town of Sandon. This distancing of Bella allows her to observe the manners of the townspeople from the perspective of an outsider/insider. Bella's quiet life is interrupted by the arrival of her ex-boyfriend, Tallis McGuin, local Nyungah football hero who has recently joined the police force as an Aboriginal Police Aid. Bella's life is thrown into further turmoil when she begins work as a security guard at the local sand mining plant. It is here at the plant that Bella discovers a plot to conceal an important anthropological report relating to a local Nyungah burial ground. The resulting 'investigation' undertaken by Bella and Tallis into this situation results in their uncovering of local government corruption and a large, commercial marijuana plantation. This simple plot allows for a complex investigation of many issues and situations that confront young people living in regional and remote areas and at the same time celebrates the beauty of the Australian bush and the importance of community. Section Two: An Hermeneutical Examination of Steel Riders is a circular investigation of the journey to creativity which investigates the ways in which the lived experience feeds the creative impulse. The fictional town of Sandon, where Steel Riders is set, is based on the real-life coal-mining town of Collie in Western Australia where I have lived for a number of years. My experiences before I came to Collie and my "life-relation" (Bultmann, 1986, p. 243) to that town, my researches into the history of the town, and my friendships with the local residents, both Nyungah and Wadgela, are interrogated within the context of the Hermeneutic Circle and the work of Johann Martin Chladenius (1742/1986) and Johann Gustav Droysen (1858/J 986). Steel Riders features a number of Indigenous characters and I have contextualised my position as a white, female writer within a discourse of Aboriginalism as propounded by Bob Hodge and Vijay Mishra (1991 ).

"A Master's paper submitted to the faculty of the School of Information and Library Science of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Library Science."
Title from PDF title page (viewed on May 21, 2006). Includes bibliographical references (p. 22-23, 28-33).

This thesis is composed of two parts: an exegesis, which examines how uncertainty, multiplicity and paradox have been negotiated in works of ‘actualist’ historical fiction, and a creative component, the novel Half-Wild, which explores the multiple identities and contradictory accounts at play in the various lives of the historical figure Eugenia Falleni (1875–1938). The exegesis opens with an examination of the influence that ‘uncertainty’, as described by the ‘new physics’, has had on the twentieth-century literary imagination. It focuses in particular on the relationship between Neils Bohr and Werner Heisenberg’s interpretation of quantum physics and the troubling of history, gender and identity in narrative fiction. Susan Strehle’s definition of ‘actualist’ fiction—positioned between realism and metafiction—is introduced in order to discuss works of historical fiction that engage with uncertain, dynamic pasts, as opposed to a fixed, fact-focused past. The argument continues with a close reading of Hilary Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety and Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon, two novels engaged in ‘actual’ history which oscillate between realism and metafiction in order to destabilise the received versions of their referent subjects and events. These novels are selected as examples of how historical fiction’s emphasis is not now on the determining of fact, but on the engagement with history as an act or process—a writing through fact and interaction with sources, a combining, recombining and troubling of possible ways things were, without eschewing the integrity of the facts themselves. The exegesis concludes with an extended analysis of the sources pertaining to the life, trial for murder, and death of the historical figure Eugenia Falleni, and how these sources have been used, ignored, or interacted with by other authors who have narrativised her life. I continue the argument by applying the principles of Strehle’s actualist fiction in my own novel, Half-Wild. The novel explores themes of indeterminacy, possibility, and paradox within representations of Falleni’s life by allowing contradictory versions of her story to co-exist in the same narrative. It makes use of collage and the juxtaposition of documentary materials, such as newspaper reports and court transcripts, as well as first-person narration and free indirect style to perform an ‘inhabitation’ of multiple, often contradictory, points of view. The novel is divided into five parts, each focusing on a different persona of Falleni’s: as tomboy Tally Ho growing up in Wellington, New Zealand; as the adult called both Harry and Jack Crawford in Sydney; as the cross-dressing Italian woman Nina Falleni; as the ‘man-woman’ convicted by the judiciary and Australian tabloid press of murdering her first wife, Annie; and as Jean Ford, a woman lying in a coma at Sydney Hospital after being struck by a car on Oxford St, Paddington, eight years after her release from prison. For a writer in 2016, it is difficult to affect a naïve obliviousness to how narrative frameworks manipulate the aspects of the past being described, or to how that past is itself linguistic, fictive, and performative in nature. With Falleni’s story refracted into five parts, each part destabilises the others: any reference to one ‘authentic’ self underpinning her various personae is avoided, allowing contradiction to inform the multiple expressions of her fluid identity, and, at the same time, the parts to operate as their own complete, immersive fiction-worlds, each contextualising one of the many ‘authentic’ selves.

The methods of production of gender diverse characters within mainstream literary texts are an under-researched area from a creative writing standpoint. Is That What You’re Wearing? Gender Diversity in Contemporary Fiction, A Novel and Exegesis is a creative writing doctoral thesis which critically interrogates the signifiers and tropes that are employed to produce gender diversity in contemporary fiction, and their effects and impacts. The exegesis, Gender Diversity in Contemporary Fiction, contextualises the theoretical ground concerning gender diversity. It critically explores issues of cultural and material access to literary works featuring gender diverse protagonists. In addition, it compares and contrasts the production of gender diversity in three contemporary novels: Chris Bohjalian’s (2000) Trans-sister Radio; Jeffrey Eugenides’ (2002b) Middlesex; and Ali Smith’s (2007) Girl Meets Boy: The Myth of Iphis. Most significantly it discusses the manner in which these two aspects inform my creative writing practice in the novel Is That What You’re Wearing? The exegesis argues that creative writers require an increased awareness of issues of representation when writing about marginalised groups, such as gender diverse individuals, to avoid perpetuating problematic and commonly used representations that otherwise sustain their marginalisation in society. The novel, which features three gender diverse characters, is the practical outcome of this critical theoretical research. As per the requirements for Victoria University creative writing theses, the creative component forms 67 per cent of the thesis, and the critical exegesis, 33 per cent. The preferred reading order for the thesis is the novel (Volume One), then the exegesis (Volume Two).

This chapter examines David Ebershoff’s novel The Danish Girl, a historical fiction based on the life of Lili Elbe (1882–1931), reputed to be one of the first people to undergo gender reassignment treatment. Genres of life writing have played a prominent role in the representation of transgender lives; the relationship between historical record, autobiography and historical fiction is complicated by the possibility that Elbe may have been an intersex person. This chapter examines the extent to which conventions of transsexual life writing obscure narratives of intersex existence, investigating the novel’s relationship to a formative source text, a generically hybrid auto/biography. The implications of the novel’s reliance on the binary categories of identity prevalent in Man into Woman will be explored in relation to categories of sex, gender (especially femininity) and sexuality (specifically male homosexuality).

After World War II, science-fiction authors found lucrative side gigs in writing fiction for young people. Before “young adult” books were a fixed category, authors like Robert Heinlein wrote stories about space for middle-grade readers, most of whom were male. This chapter looks at Heinlein’s juvenile fiction published by Scribner’s, and shows how his work reinforced a vision of scientific masculinity.