Reading list: trans dopplegängers
So last week, I posed this question on Twitter:
And lo! Answers arrived! This is by no means a conclusive list, but there are some amazing stories here. (If you’ve got others, please yell at me about them on Twitter or through the contact form on my website.)
While doing some minimal googling for “transgender” and “dopplegänger,” I found this quote from Jennifer Finney Boylan, taken from an acceptance speech for a GLAAD award.
For transgender people, the story of the doppelganger, or double, takes on a unique twist. For many of us, the story of our lives is often the story of a person trying to let go of one identity, and embracing another; it’s our hope that this transformation, unlike that in the Jeckyl/Hyde configuration, is one that leads from a false self towards a true one. We sometimes face the additional struggle that we’re often surrounded by people, including some of the the ones that love us most in the world, who at least initially seem to prefer the Mr. Hyde side of our selves. Jeckyll? they say to us. Why on earth would you go to all this trouble just to become Jeckyll.
If there’s a constant thread throughout these stories, it’s this distance between the self you recognize and the one society recognizes. These stories grapple with that in different ways, and approach the idea of dopplegängers from a number of directions.
“O Human Star” by Blue Deliquanti (added 9/26)
Alastair Sterling was the inventor who sparked the robot revolution. And because of his sudden death, he didn’t see any of it.
That is, until he wakes up 16 years later in a robot body that matches his old one exactly. Until he steps outside and finds a world utterly unlike the one he left behind – a world where robots live alongside their human neighbors and coexist in their cities. A world he helped create.
Now Al must track down his old partner Brendan to find out who is responsible for Al’s unexpected resurrection, but their reunion raises even more questions.
Like who the robot living with Brendan is. And why she looks like Al. And how much of the past should stay in the past…
“Travellers in the Autumn Wood” by Phoebe Barton (added 9/26)
The floatplane left her in silence. Taryn Liang savored it for a moment before she stepped off the age-worn dock onto solid earth, where a stranger wore the face she saw in her own mirror every day—part of one of the world’s stranger sisterhoods, cloned in a lab and salted into the world.
“Chokechain” by Andrew Joseph White
Forum: Family and Relationships
New thread —
Mom bought a Robo & Co android. Looks just like me, except, you know.Not trans. (Rant)
This story is fierce and viscerally written, and its protagonist deals with betrayal of the highest order. The thing I liked the most about this story is that the conflict here between Michael, his shitty family, and his “new sister” is also a frame for him struggling with his own ideas of masculinity and violence. It’s available online, but also in the Transcendent 4 anthology, which is ALL transgender speculative fiction, and deserves your money.
“Me, Waiting for Me, Hoping for Something More” by Dee Warwick
You didn’t want to know what it would be like to fuck her. Or maybe you did, but not just that. You wanted to know what it would be like to feel the spirit of your hands in her hands, to use her fingers to brush the hair out of her eyes. To look in the mirror and recognize yourself as her. You’d never really noticed before, not in so concrete a way that you’d be able to express it in words, but looking in the mirror had always been a nightmare for you. I lived in the mirror. I, with my jutting larynx and broadening shoulders, I with my barely-there mustache and—god, what a horrible betrayal—my cock.
This story has literally everything: impossible architecture (one of my favorite tropes), creepy new gods, and a defiant middle-finger to Lovecraft and all his current sycophantic defenders. It’s narrated by the… I’m not sure how to put this: the personification of a woman’s dyphoria? the ghost of the cisgender man everyone believed she was? It’s not explained (which I like — sometimes an explanation ruins a conceit for me) but it’s amazing.
“The Ghost on Platte River Access Road” by Brendan Williams-Childs
They looked each other in the eyes and his whole body suddenly hurt like a raw nerve. Every inch of skin ached, needle-pricked. She kept smiling as she spoke but he couldn’t hear what she was saying.
I almost don’t want to give too much away about this story. The slow reveal of the characters’ history, the isolation, the visceral prose— I loved this. Just go read it.
“All the Hometowns You Can’t Stay Away From” by Izzy Wasserstein
You’re standing on the street looking at your mother’s house when another you steps out the front door. Her hair is still its natural brown, and she’s maybe five years older than you, but she has the same scar across her cheek, the same beat-up travel bag. She sees you, sighs, and shakes her head, wordlessly telling you not to bother going inside.
Okay, so this is a bit of a cheat, since it’s less about dopplegängers than about multiple worlds. Should it be included here? It’s a damn good story, so why not? It explodes the metaphor of being unable to go home again, of dealing (or not) with grief, and understanding how the choices that you made (or didn’t) defined you.
“It Happened To Me: My Doppleganger Stole My Credit Card Info, and then My Life” by Nino Cipri
I wanted to hug her, hard enough to squeeze us back into the same body. I didn’t dare take another step towards her.
Yes, I forgot that I had written a dopplegänger story. It’s not my favorite thing I’ve written (and its protagonist isn’t explicitly trans), but it does have a band that plays ska versions of Billy Joel covers.
“Sarah’s Child” by Susan Jane Bigelow
I was lucky. I knew I was. I had a home, a cute girlfriend, and a job. I didn't get abuse on the streets. I wasn't young anymore and I was never pretty, but so what?
So what.
Why did I want what I could never, ever have so badly?
Sarah has a dream about having a child named Sheldon. Sarah doesn’t have children, can’t get pregnant, and her grief opens a doorway. She starts receiving texts, phone calls, and letters, and eventually goes to meet another version of herself.
MY FEELINGS. I don’t want kids, but oh god, this story made me ache.
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