2025 PEN World Voices Festival: Towards A Trans Aesthetic

In the 21st century, the understanding of gender has significantly evolved, moving away from an established binary toward a more fluid and, many would say, inclusive view. Kate Bornstein, a pioneering transgender author, says this transformation has opened up a “fourth dimension”:

“Gender in the fourth dimension allows me to say I’m a four-year-old boy… I’m a 30 year-old-man… I’m a 45-year-old woman… And now I’m a 77-year-old… And once we start looking at gender in that way, we can’t be misgendered.”  

At the 2025 PEN World Voices Festival session “Towards A Trans Aesthetic,” Bornstein joined four acclaimed authors to discuss their experiences reading and writing trans narratives. Four of the authors — PEN America President Jennifer Finney Boylan, Bornstein, Oliver Radclyffe, and Meredith Talusan — write primarily in prose. The fifth, Bishakh Som, is a graphic novelist. Together, the group delved into the literature seminal to their understanding of their gender identities, the ways that their motivations as writers have shifted over time, and methods of resisting concerted political efforts to erase trans and nonbinary individuals.  

The session, in Boylan’s words, featured a great deal of “trans fabulousness packed in a small space.”

On Kate Bornstein’s Gender Outlaw 

Gender Outlaw, which details Bornstein’s transition from a heterosexual man to a lesbian woman, “rocked the world” of many trans readers when it was published in 1994, Boylan said. 

Talusan: “Gender Outlaw was deeply, deeply influential for me being able to find words for who I am, and I was literally getting emotional when I read it in college.” 

Radclyffe: “Reading what you had written 20 years before I transitioned, and talking about these experiences that were so close to mine — it blew my mind, and I had this moment of outrage that people like me had not discovered it, that I had been living this incredibly heterosexual, cisgender life, and that it hadn’t come under my radar.” 

On writing about transness decades apart 

Radclyffe: “I think I felt like there was a degree of understanding that people already had [when writing Frighten the Horses]. People understand the terminology now. I was writing for a cis audience, so there was this relief that I didn’t have to explain things.” 

Boylan: “My new book, Cleavage, is very much a bookend to She’s Not There, 20 years later. Looking at She’s Not There, there is an air of apology about it, an air of, ‘Please forgive me. I hope I can make you understand what it’s like to be me. Oh, how I suffered. And I just want your love.’ It’s the thing I think has aged the least well about the book, because now I feel like, ‘Jenny Boylan, get up off your knees and stop asking for other people’s acceptance.’” 

On the popularity of the graphic novel among young trans writers 

Som: “It’s a hybrid genre, you know” — “like us,” quipped Boylan — “even though [words] and pictures are not such an odd combination. The combination has been around since a goddess made words and images.” 

Boylan: “There’s a thing about writing prose that — with apologies to all the writers whom I represent as president — it’s a little stuffy, you know. There’s something about prose that’s intimidating. And there are times when, if I get writer’s block, it’s because I’m like, ‘Oh, God, well, how am I ever gonna find the words? How am I ever gonna find the words?’ Whereas when I draw comics, I’m just like, ‘Yeah, okay, I’m drawing, we’re cool. Nobody’s judging me.’” 

On writing as a tool of resistance  

Recently, the U.S. government has leveled direct attacks on gender nonconforming identities. The January executive order “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government” recognized only two genders, “male” and “female,” thereby denying the existence of trans, intersex, and nonbinary individuals. Boylan asked the group whether and how they can employ writing as a tool of resistance in response to such attacks. 

Bornstein: “My superpower is I know how to think about gender. And if [Donald Trump] is going to force us back into a cave, or try to, I want to help people think about gender in a way that frees them up. I want to give people thinking tools, and that’s kind of what I’m doing.” 

Talusan: “One of the important things for me has been to introspect about what I want to write, and write in any way, even if I’m afraid, because otherwise I’m letting the bully win … For better or for worse, I am just socialized to believe that my spiritual freedom is worth so much more than whatever political dangers I experience because of expressing that spiritual freedom.”

Som: “I think just writing the thing and putting it out there is the smallest act of resistance that I can muster. The project I’m working on now, a new book, is a proposal for a different system of being in the world. The moments that I really loved writing and drawing are the moments of a transcendental bliss of imagining what it could be like to be free of the yoke of certain systems that we all live under, and to fully thrive and to be fully in the world, in a world made and designed and that only includes trans people.”