I bought this book after reading this article about JK Rowling’s public descent into transphobia and bourgeois detachment. Jackson Bird is a trans man for whom Harry Potter has played a big role in both his life and career (he used to work full time for the charity Harry Potter Alliance). He was interviewed for the article and expressed his sadness about JKR’s transphobia and how his relationship to the series has changed since all of that became public knowledge. A memoir by a trans person about his gender and also Harry Potter? I had to get it. Both personally and for my orals reading, since Harry Potter plays a HUGE role in literacy development among millennials, and many people have stories of how their relationship with HP relates to their relationship with their own gender and/or sexuality.
Bird says this book grew from a pamphlet he put together when he was coming out to friends and family to inform and educate them, without having to have the same difficult conversation over and over again. People liked it and asked for more. His YouTube channel, which originally didn’t have a particular content focus, eventually became centered around trans education. At one point in the book, he says he saw a lot of YouTube content designed for other trans people (like people documenting their transitions), but not a lot designed to inform cis people about trans issues. So, he wanted to contribute to this area.
I think this book does the same thing— naturally, given the situation of its origins. The book reads like it’s intended primarily for cis people and/or trans people who are just beginning to learn about trans-related topics. I can’t help but compare it to Sissy, since Jacob Tobia specifically says in their book that they DON’T want it to be a book for cis people. They want to do a bare minimum of educating on the basics in their book, and mostly just tell their story. In contrast, Bird has many pullboxes throughout the book with deeper explanations of topics and referrals to other educational resources.
It was surprising to me that Bird felt there was very little trans content designed for cis people, since I feel like most criticism of trans media is saying that too much of it is meant for cis people’s consumption and we ought to have more trans media created with a trans audience in mind. But maybe that just wasn’t the case on YouTube in the 2010s?
Sorted and Sissy are similar in other ways, namely that both authors come from similar backgrounds— Southern middle class suburbs, conservative religious communities, film and theatre experience both as children and professionally. While Tobia is from my same hometown, Bird spent the early 2010s living basically my dream life— being 5 years older than me, he was able to actually go to the Harry Potter conferences and actually make friends with his favorite YouTubers, who were also my favorite YouTubers, whereas I was still a young teen and couldn’t do those things. So, these memoirs also feel similar to me just based on my personal connections with the authors.
One thing I think Bird does really well in Sorted is showing how dysphoria can grow over time as your awareness of your gender changes. Not everyone knows from when they are very young that they are trans, but Bird’s story makes it very clear how even if you make it through 20 years of your life without realizing it, that doesn’t make your dysphoria any less painful. In high school, Bird was able to dress and act as a feminine woman regularly, without being particularly conscious of any psychic pain this caused him. As he grew more and more in touch with his gender and identity as a trans man, this became progressively more impossible. Once he started wearing a binder, not wearing one felt all the more horrible, even though he’d never liked his chest to begin with. At one point, he was able to stomach wearing a dress for formal events and just “flip the switch” in his brain for a few hours as long as he had time to emotionally recover afterwards, but then one year, the switch disappeared entirely.
In Trans: A Memoir, Juliet Jacques does describe how originally she didn’t think she would be interested in hormone therapy or gender affirmation surgery, even after she knew she was trans, but later changed her mind about each one. However, she doensn’t go into as much detail about her internal process of how/why her feelings evolved over time as Bird does.
That’s not to say I think any of these three books are better or worse than the others, but they do different things. Both Sissy and Trans: A Memoir say they want to stay away from stereotypical features of “the trans memoir” (like a focus on physical changes and ending with The Surgery), but Trans: A Memoir both begins and nearly ends with Jacques’s surgery (there’s a bit more about other things at the end), and Sorted definitely does build to Bird’s top surgery as the climax, even though he also discusses how no surgery ever just Gets Rid of All Of Your Difficulties, and he still has body image issues— but, as he happily realizes, body image issues common to many men, both trans and cis! However, I don’t know how much of this is a structural choice and how much is just….I’m pretty sure he got his top surgery fairly recently, so between the time it took to write the book and then have it go through the publishing process (it came out in September 2019), I imagine just not that much time has passed in order for more stuff for him to write about in the book to happen.
I do wish, and this isn’t his fault at all, that the timing had worked out that he could have written about JKR’s transphobia and how that impacted his relationship with the series and fandom (if he wanted to talk about it in the book, that is). He talks about it in the interview for the article linked to above, but it’s just a couple quotes and, having gotten to know him through 300 pages of his writerly voice, I’d like to read his thoughts on it!