I couldn’t write about a trans character now, says Booker-nominated author

Anita Singh
Tue, October 10, 2023 

Tremain says some of her bestselling novels would be unlikely to make it into print today - Andrew Crowley


A Booker-nominated writer who included a trans child in one of her novels has said she would not be able to do so today as authors are being “boxed in” by their experiences.

Rose Tremain, author of Restoration, said some of her bestselling novels would be unlikely to make it into print today.

She wrote about the experiences of a trans child in Sacred Country, published in 1992, researching the subject by speaking to people with gender dysphoria. In 2008, she wrote The Road Home, in which the protagonist is an eastern European widower who comes to the UK in search of work.


“I think I definitely wouldn’t be able to do them now,” Tremain said.

“I wrote about a little girl called Mary who believes she’s a boy. I was very interested in the subject because I felt at the time it was one of the last unexplained things.

“I loved writing that book and it makes me feel slightly sad to think that if I were to embark on a subject like that now, people would say, ‘Oh, no, it’s inauthentic’ because I haven’t experienced it.

In 1992 Tremain wrote about the experiences of a trans child in Sacred Country, researching the subject by speaking to people with gender dysphoria

“We are in this curtailment moment where we are boxed in,” she told an audience at the Cheltenham Literature Festival.

“The Road Home is about an immigrant from Eastern Europe. Again, I did a lot of research and I think it’s as authentic a journey as I could possibly have made it, but I think it isn’t something that I could write now.

“So we are a bit boxed in, particularly writers like me who have always gone into somebody else’s consciousness.

“My career has been long, and I think that’s what has made it long. If you endlessly write about yourself, you run out of material aged about 45, and I’ve never run out of material. But now maybe I have to rethink that.”

Tremain, 80, said she felt on safer ground with her memoir, published in 2018, because “people can’t complain about me writing about my own life”.

Her latest novel, Absolutely and Forever, draws on her memories of her teenage years in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

The author was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Restoration in 1988 and longlisted in 2000 for Trespass. The former was turned into an Oscar-winning film starring Robert Downey Jr.

Sacred Country won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and Tremain said people had urged her not to write it, but only because trans issues were little heard of in the 1990s.

“I remember at the time people saying, ‘This is such a marginal subject. Why are you writing about this?’” she recalled.

“They said it was on the periphery of society. And now, of course, it’s absolutely forefront and affecting the way we think and behave.”

National LGBTQ groups sue North Carolina over transgender youth health care ban

Kyle Ingram
Wed, October 11, 2023 

Vladimir Vladimirov/Getty Images


A group of national and local LGBTQ organizations said Wednesday they have sued North Carolina over new legislation that bans most gender-affirming health care for transgender youth.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court by Lambda Legal and several other groups, argues that the law, House Bill 808, violates the 14th Amendment and infringes on the rights of parents to make medical decisions with their children.

“Trans youth deserve the ability to be themselves and to be free from discrimination,” Omar Gonzalez-Pagan, a lawyer with Lambda Legal, said. “Parents should not have their rights curtailed because their children are transgender. By bringing this case, we are seeking to vindicate those rights.”

Plaintiffs are seeking a preliminary injunction to block the law’s implementation as the case goes on.

The bill in question bans surgical gender transitions for minors and also bans the prescription of hormones or puberty-blocking drugs for minors. Health care providers who violate the law could have their medical licenses revoked.

Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper vetoed the bill in July, saying, “A doctor’s office is no place for politicians.” Republicans, who hold a supermajority in both chambers of the legislature, overrode his veto to enact the bill.

Sen. Joyce Krawiec, a Republican from Forsyth County, defended the bill as the legislature passed it into law, saying the state “has an interest in protecting our children from long-term harm. That’s what this bill is all about.”

A similar law in Arkansas was permanently blocked after a federal judge ruled it to be unconstitutional.

Among the plaintiffs in the case are a 9-year-old transgender boy and his parents, who say the law prevents him from obtaining necessary medical care to treat his gender dysphoria.

HB 808 is one of several bills passed this session that target LGBTQ youth. Lawmakers passed a bill that bans transgender women from competing on women’s sports teams. Republicans also passed the Parents’ Bill of Rights, which bans curriculum from mentioning gender identity or sexuality in early grades and requires teachers to inform parents if their child begins using a different name or pronouns.

North Carolina family, doctor sue to block state’s gender-affirming health care ban

Brooke Migdon
Wed, October 11, 2023

Two national LGBTQ rights groups, a North Carolina doctor and a family with a transgender child are challenging a new North Carolina law preventing transgender minors from receiving gender-affirming health care.

The coalition argues in a federal lawsuit filed Wednesday that the law discriminates on the basis of gender identity and infringes on the right of parents to make medical decisions on behalf of their children.

North Carolina’s House Bill 808, which went into effect Oct. 1, prohibits health care providers in the state from administering gender-affirming medical care — including hormones, puberty blockers and certain surgical procedures — to transgender youths younger than 18.

The state’s Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper vetoed the bill, along with two other measures targeting LGBTQ young people, in July. In August, North Carolina’s GOP-controlled Legislature voted to override Cooper’s vetoes, allowing measures that ban gender-affirming care for youth, prevent transgender women and girls from competing on female sports teams and limit classroom instruction about sexual orientation and gender identity to take effect.

Cooper called the trio of bills “a triple threat of political culture wars.”

North Carolina health care providers under House Bill 808 are expressly prohibited from prescribing or dispensing puberty blockers or doses of testosterone or estrogen to transgender individuals younger than 18, although identical treatments are still legally available to minors with a “medically verifiable disorder of sex development.”

The measure also prohibits doctors from providing or recommending “surgical gender transition procedures” to transgender minors and bars state funds — including for North Carolina Medicaid participants — from being used to support gender-affirming health care for youth. Health care providers who violate the law risk losing their medical licenses.

Gender-affirming care for both transgender adults and minors is considered medically necessary and often life-saving by every major medical organization. The American Medical Association’s policymaking body during an annual meeting in June said the group will oppose “state and federal legislation that would prohibit or limit gender-affirming care.”

In the federal lawsuit filed Wednesday, a couple calling themselves Vanessa and Vance Voe, who live in North Carolina with their 9-year-old transgender son, Victor, said their lives will be “turned upside down” if House Bill 808 is allowed to remain in effect.

The family, which is proceeding pseudonymously to protect its privacy, said in Wednesday’s lawsuit that Victor Voe “is terrified of going through a puberty that is completely foreign to him” if he is prevented from taking puberty blockers, saying “his anxiety is growing.”

Vanessa and Vance Voe, the lawsuit says, “cannot bear to witness their child go through physical changes that will profoundly harm him,” but they “do not wish to uproot their lives, nor can they imagine bearing the long-term financial costs associated with leaving the state to get care for Victor.”

Victor Voe loves video games and music and he hopes to be a marine biologist one day, the family’s attorneys said Wednesday.

The Voe family is joined by Riley Smith, a North Carolina family physician, and the LGBTQ rights groups PFLAG and GLMA in suing the state over House Bill 808.

The plaintiffs, represented by Lambda Legal and the National Health Law Program, are asking for a preliminary injunction to block the law’s enforcement while the legal challenge against it proceeds.

“As a family physician that serves transgender patients, I can confirm that gender-affirming care is lifesaving,” Smith said in Wednesday a statement.

“Laws banning gender-affirming care will have dire consequences for transgender youth. We do not need politicians in the exam rooms with us, overriding thew decisions of families and their doctor or putting our professional licenses at risk for doing our jobs,” he said. “Instead, providers in North Carolina should be able to provide the highest quality, evidence-based care to their transgender patients, just like we do for our other patients.”