Falling Back in Love with Trans-Inclusive Feminism: Canadian Creative Artists Re-Story Death and Choose Transformation

Abstract

Prevailing political and popular narratives often treat the issue of trans death as an inevitability and reduce complex stories of trans life to their endings. This paper investigates the transformative potential of creative forms of resistance—specifically a selection of Canadian poetry, personal essays, and comics—and how their artistic affordances engage with transfeminism as an approach to narratives of trans existence. Rooted in Canadian author Kai Cheng Thom’s reckoning with the shortcomings of trans-exclusionary feminist thought, and informed by Chinua Achebe’s conceptualization of re-storying, this article explores how I Hope We Choose Love and Falling Back in Love with Being Human by Kai Cheng Thom, Death Threat by Canadian creatives Vivek Shraya and Ness Lee, and comics from Assigned Male by trans activist and Canadian comic artist Sophie Labelle re-story “necessary” trans death to orient queer death spaces around a trans-for-trans (t4t) praxis of narrativization. Addressing the (inter)disciplinary possibilities of trans-inclusive feminism and comics studies, this article celebrates how these texts disavow and re-story the “Good” Trans Character, who dies to satisfy transmisogynistic ideologies, and theorizes the T4t Dead Trans Character, who dies to reclaim instances of trans death and recodify trans personhood as a site of hope, agency, and self-determination. In their re-storying, these texts recognize the transformative potential of trans existence and echo Thom in their urging of trans-inclusive feminism to renounce narratives of disposability and invest in the dignity of all human life.

1. Introduction

“There is something that happens to brilliant trans women. We don’t seem to talk about it much”, reflects Kai Cheng Thom in her politically charged collection of personal essays and poems, I Hope We Choose Love; “A story that keeps repeating itself: We burst into being; we give birth to ourselves. We burn like stars in the fight to survive. Like mayflies, we soar ever so briefly, then fall” (2019, p. 139). It is neither a secret nor a surprise that a seeming inevitability in the popularized stories of trans women, especially trans women of color, is sudden, untimely, and often violent death. The “Good” Trans Character that often acts as the focus of this literary death drive exceptionally “burst[s] into being”, her political involvement, social engagements, and fetishized transition become publicly consumable displays before—whether missing or dead—she disappears. As Vox Jo Hsu argues in “The Impossible Trans Body: Non/Images of Gender in Regimes of Whiteness”, the “abstract danger” of trans and gender-nonconforming (TGNC) bodies stems from “[a]nti-trans rhetorics, however detached from reality, [that] affect how trans people must navigate physical space” (2023, p. 264). Whether in doctors’ offices, lavatories, gym changerooms, or on the street, “[w]hen the TGNC body is more abstract danger than human being, actual trans people immaterialize. I am both here and not here. I am more problem than person” (Hsu 2023, p. 265). The abstract danger that the TGNC body represents “immaterializes” with the death of the “Good” Trans Character in the face of transphobic, gender essentialist rhetoric that “locates the threat of trans people not in any action but in [their] very bodies” (Hsu 2023, p. 262).

I define the “Good” Trans Character as the trans person who dies to satisfy transmisogynistic ideologies and mitigate the so-called abstract danger of the TGNC body. The Good Trans Character uses an ironic take on “good” to emphasize that this characterization comes from the cisgender, heterosexual systems in which TGNC bodies find themselves. The Good Trans Character is only “good” insomuch as they die and in their death confirm gender and sexual essentialisms—neoliberal, patriarchal, feminist, or otherwise. That is, the Good Trans Character must die to keep these anti-trans rhetorics intact. It is from this reductive mode of storytelling, in part, that the popularized death-driven narrative of trans identities arises. This type of cyclical narrative, as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie explains in “The Danger of a Single Story”, repeatedly presents a single perspective and promotes reductive, binary interpretations of an identity or identity group (Adichie 2009). Adichie terms such narratives “single stories.” In its many iterations, the single story limits cross-community connectivity, robs minoritarian identities and communities of their dignity, denies their accurate recognition or equal “human” status, and flattens narratives of diverse lived experiences (Adichie 2009). As a broad literary mechanism, Adichie’s single story construction facilitates a widespread adoption of reductive narratives through which the single story becomes the only story. The Good Trans Character, and many other “good” characters, are born through this socio-literary framework, occupying both literary and literal positions entrenched in social, political, and cultural realities.

Adichie argues that the inclusive antonym to the single story is “complex stories”, narratives that recognize the diversity of lived experiences within a community, promote acceptance and understanding, and encourage readers, listeners, and observers to find value and interest in the intricacies of these identities and communities (Adichie 2009). As Ebony Elizabeth Thomas and Amy Stornaiuolo argue in “Restorying the Self: Bending Toward Textual Justice”, complex stories necessitate “telling a multitude of stories that can humanize and empower” (2016, p. 314). In theory, constructing a mosaic of complex stories creates a more accurate and authentic view of communities that will, over time, subsume the long-standing single story. However, while this term identifies the desired result of shifting narratives away from the single story, the process through which storytellers achieve this narrative mosaic is as complex and multifaceted as its end goal. As Chinua Achebe argues, one way to resist the single story is “for those who have been dispossessed or silenced to restory themselves” (Thomas and Stornaiuolo 2016, p. 314; original emphasis) and establish “a balance of stories where every people will be able to contribute to a definition of themselves, where we are not victims of other people’s accounts” (Achebe qtd. in Bacon 2000). Re-storying, then, is a form of narrativized resistance through which the single story transforms into complex stories.

This process of re-storying requires recognizing and applying what Eve Tuck terms “complex personhood.” Tuck cites Avery Gordon’s understanding of complex personhood as “conferring the respect on others that comes from presuming that life and people’s lives are simultaneously straightforward and full of enormously subtle meaning” (Gordon 1997, p. 5). She then expands upon Gordon’s definition and suggests that complex personhood further necessitates “collectivity and the interdependence of the collective and the person” (Tuck 2009, p. 420). As part of this interdependence and shift toward collectivity, Tuck posits that complex personhood requires “making room for the contradictions, for the mis/re/cognitions” to “sustain a sense of collective balance” (2009, p. 421). As Tuck argues for a sense of collective balance, Adichie argues for the inherent complexity and diversity of narratives that seek to unveil and define a community. These acts of storying further align with Tuck’s differentiation between narratives of damage and those of desire. In “Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities”, she characterizes damage-centered narratives as “a pathologizing approach” through which “oppression singularly defines a community” as it “operates, even benevolently, from a theory of change that establishes harm or injury in order to achieve reparation” (Tuck 2009, p. 413). Conversely, desire-based narratives “are concerned with understanding complexity, contradiction, and the self-determination of lived lives. […] This is to say that even when communities are broken and conquered, they are so much more than that—so much more that this incomplete story is an act of aggression” (Tuck 2009, p. 416). Much like Adichie’s single and complex stories, Tuck’s understanding of damage versus desire stems from an (in)ability to recognize the diversity of lived experiences. I suggest that Achebe’s concept of re-storying facilitates a shift from the damage-based single story to desire-based complex stories, opening space for a reclamation of desire in narratives of trans identities.

“What is the role of a storyteller”, asks Kai Cheng Thom in I Hope We Choose Love; “Why do we tell stories in the first place, and for whom?” (2019, p. 97; original emphasis). Expanding on these queries: how can storytellers harness their transformative powers to address the deaths of “good” minoritarian characters, and for whom can this normalized death serve a re-storied purpose? To answer these questions, I turn to the hopeful and desire-based construction of (re)storytelling, namely, accepting damage and desire as inextricable elements of storytelling. I argue that Canadian creative forms of resistance including I Hope We Choose Love and Falling Back in Love with Being Human by Kai Cheng Thom, Vivek Shraya and Ness Lee’s comic book Death Threat, and comics from Sophie Labelle’s Assigned Male effectively undertake the re-storying process to move away from the single story of the Good Trans Character and toward more complex stories through what I term the T4t1 (trans-for-trans) Dead Trans Character. I propose that this figure re-orients normalized trans death spaces to center hope, desire, trans agency, and personhood in a trans-inclusive feminist re-storying of trans death.

Considering the potential of trans-inclusive feminism necessitates, as Kimberlé Crenshaw outlines in “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color”, an acknowledgement that, “implicit in certain strands of feminist and racial liberation movements, […] is the view that the social power of delineating difference need not be the power of domination; it can instead be the source of social empowerment and reconstruction” (1991, p. 1242). As she suggests, since “identity politics takes place at the site where categories intersect”, it is important to work with intersectionality to “better acknowledge and ground the differences among us and negotiate the means by which these differences will find expression in constructing group politics” (Crenshaw 1991, p. 1299). The categories of difference that we delineate, deconstruct, and support come laden with meanings, consequences, and particular values that “foster and create social hierarchies” (Crenshaw 1991, pp. 1296–97). Since the single story of the Good Trans Character relies heavily on understandings and treatments of categories of difference, it is important to consider what it “mean[s] to do minoritarian studies without being driven by the desire to rehabilitate the subjects/objects of our knowledge”, as Cameron Awkward-Rich suggests in “Trans, Feminism: Or, Reading like a Depressed Transsexual” (Awkward-Rich 2017, p. 824).

Awkward-Rich proposes that “notic[ing] pain and […taking] it as a fact of being embodied that is not necessarily loaded with moral weight” (2017, p. 824) requires reading like a depressed transsexual, that is, reading “from a position both committed to the idea that trans lives are ‘lived, hence livable’ while also taking feeling bad as a mundane fact” (2017, p. 826). Approaching the Good Trans Character from this readerly position requires a reconciliation between the livability of trans lives and the presence of anti-trans violence, through which trans death becomes a space of transition rather than a finality. Awkward-Rich concludes that “[t]he depressed transsexual, then, might assess this situation and determine that the problem is not so much that (some) feminists would like him gone. Rather, the problem is that he is here, and now we all have to figure out how to live with that” (2017, p. 832). Although he focuses on transmasculinity and trans(masculine)feminist integration, the problem that Awkward-Rich’s depressed transsexual identifies also applies to the Good Trans Character. The “problem” being that trans lives are, and will always be, livable alongside trans death, which requires new ways of understanding the transformative potential of this death and its relationship to patriarchal, feminist, and trans-affirming understandings of trans lives. Following in the footsteps of the depressed transsexual, I argue that accomplishing this requires a reconfiguration of our collective relationship to and understanding of trans death as a transformative posthumous space. As part of this work, I conceptualize the T4t Dead Trans Character, who stands in opposition to the Good Trans Character, as the trans person who dies and, in their death, reclaims normalized trans death and grave spaces, re-orienting them toward trans agency and personhood.

Originating on Craigslist personals to indicate a trans person seeking intimacy with another trans person, initial understandings of t4t designate “a type of separatism, [and] it carries risks such as identity policing, the prioritization of one aspect of identity over others, and difficulty engaging in strategic coalition” (Awkward-Rich and Malatino 2022). However, community members, scholars, and activists have taken this separatist understanding of t4t and given it new life so that it “also circulates as a promising practice of love, repair, and healing” (Awkward-Rich and Malatino 2022). One such scholar is Vox Jo Hsu, who uses the term “t4t love-politics” to re-orient t4t and its political associations to “centre[] affective connections as a site of community building and political transformation” (Hsu 2022b, pp. 102–3). Taking direction from Hsu’s t4t love-politics, I apply t4t in the T4t Dead Trans Character to represent the importance of communities of care in re-storying trans death and the impact re-storying has on interpersonal relations and social justice movements. As a re-storied minoritarian agent, the T4t Dead Trans Character takes the normative, damage-centric single story of trans death, transmutes it and, in so doing, opens a space wherein trans people can desire their individual and collective humanity.

Much like how trans-inclusive feminism embraces complex representations of and identifications with gender and centers a multiplicity of subjective experiences, the T4t Dead Trans Character embraces complex stories, understandings of, and identifications with trans death as a means of renouncing narratives that assume trans bodies are inherently disposable. In what follows, I address a collection of creative forms of resistance—that is, works that embrace the intersection of creativity and resistance and brush against multiple generic categorizations, thematic explorations, and personal, social, and communal narratives—to illustrate the versatility of the T4t Dead Trans Character, the potential of engaging with trans-inclusive feminism as an approach to narratives of trans existence, and the (inter)disciplinary possibilities of a trans-inclusive feminism that renounces narratives of disposability. Beginning with the potential in Kai Cheng Thom’s engagements with trans death in I Hope We Choose Love and Falling Back in Love with Being Human, then working through the spiritual and physical deaths in Vivek Shraya and Ness Lee’s Death Threat and representations of trans death and memorialization in comics from Sophie Labelle’s Assigned Male, I unravel how these texts treat the end of trans life as a symbolic, transformative act steeped in love, reclamation, and vulnerability.

2. Re-Storying as Space-Making: Kai Cheng Thom’s Posthumous “Growing” and Falling Back in Love with Transfeminism

I Hope We Choose Love is a “heartbreaking yet hopeful collection of personal essays and poems […and] a call for nuance in a time of political polarization, for healing in a time of justice and for love in an apocalypse” (Thom 2019) in which Kai Cheng Thom brings her lived experiences, creativity, and the harsh realities of contemporary political movements together in an insistent and loving call to action. Thom describes this love, both a sentiment and praxis, as “kind but also honest”, “courageous and relentless and willing to break the rules and smash the system”, “that cares about people more than ideas, that prizes each and every one of us as essential and indispensable”, “that is compassionate and accountable”, “love that confirms and reaffirms us as complex and fallible yet lovable anyway, love that affirms us as human” (2019, p. 11). In essence, Thom views love as a verb, as something that requires constant and continuous effort, and as necessary work that affirms individual complexities and imperfections and refuses to deny one’s lovability on the basis of their mistakes. It is with this radical and revolutionary love that I approach the T4t Dead Trans Character which, as Thom suggests about love, “might not save us at the end of the world but that might make it possible to live through” (2019, p. 11).

I Hope We Choose Love puts this revolutionary love into practice by reckoning with the shortcomings of radical social justice movements through its treatment of violence, socio-political complicity, forgiveness, healing, and love in trans communities. For example, moving away from the falsely radical argument that trans suicide is “an act of personal agency that should be upheld and supported by ‘the community’” (Thom 2019, p. 42), Thom argues that this radical perspective on suicidality as natural or politically powerful for trans women is, rather, “the ultimate expression of disposability culture” (2019, p. 45) that enables transmisogyny and promotes trans death. Rather than “freeing” trans women, community-enabled or complicit suicide perpetuates the single story of the Good Trans Character, effectively populating t4t spaces and rhetorics with the transmisogynistic call for trans death. Without shaming or pathologizing an individual’s decision to die by suicide, Thom lovingly problematizes the supposed political power and personal agency behind community-upheld suicide. She suggests that it is a community’s “responsibility to change the stakes, to offer different options, to keep reaching out and sending the message that we will never stop trying, never stop caring, never stop loving” (Thom 2019, p. 46). Thom refuses “to disguise inactions in the face of mass suffering and death in a pretense of compassion and radical politics” (Thom 2019, p. 45), a sentiment through which I read “growing”, one of the poems featured in I Hope We Choose Love, and recognize its work to claim agency in literary, rather than literal, instances of trans death. As Thom identifies, defines, and denies harmful radical trans politics and the Good Trans Character, “growing” re-storys this figure into the T4t Dead Trans Character and re-orients their death space to emphasize the permanence of trans identities.

“growing” is a poem from “Part 3: Let Us Believe” of I Hope We Choose Love that recounts a nameless individual’s death and posthumous life. Fiction and poetic imagination rest at the foundation of this creative piece as it follows the speaker into and beyond the grave. However, the poem’s use of first-person narration in the broader formal and creative contexts of the collection positions Thom as the poem’s speaker. The “I”s that echo across this poem recall those of the preceding essay, “The Chinese Transsexual’s Guide to Cheongsam”, and foreground those of the proceeding essay, “Where Did She Go? A Trans Girl Ghost Story.” In this first-person narratorial framework, Thom, as both critic and character, embodies the T4t Dead Trans Character and “growing” emblematically unravels her experiences by imagining her fictive death and posthumous life. The poem opens with character-Thom, pleading:

• let us not speak
• of what happened between us.
• instead, let us speak
• of what happened after:
• my skin became a shroud
• while the poison of your past
• sank into my bones.
• organs ossified, my liver on ice
• […]
• thoughts locked on loop, muscles flooded
• with memory: trauma is the body
• torn out of time.
(Thom 2019, p. 131)

Character-Thom’s request to speak of what happened “after” indicates that the deterioration, ossification, and flooding of her body are events that precede the present of the poem. In the recount of her bodily transformation, character-Thom repeatedly uses “my” to signal a claim to her embodied existence while also recognizing the lack of control she held in this transformative process. She recalls: “my skin became a shroud/while the poison of your past/sank into my bones” (Thom 2019, p. 131). Rather than intentionally making or turning her skin into a shroud, her skin “became” a shroud, suggesting a form of embodied knowledge which, as she narrates, comes “with memory: trauma is the body/torn out of time” (Thom 2019, p. 131).

Although these forms of embodied decomposition imply physical death, Thom makes this transition out of life abundantly clear, writing:

• no prayer had the power
• to reach me then
• no holy water
• could anoint this flesh.
• faith is the connective tissue that binds us all
• to the celestial bodies
• of the universe.
• faith is trust in the world
• and mine was torn.
(Thom 2019, p. 131)

Although the “then” in these lines is nondescript, the disconnect between holy water and flesh implies the final removal of the flesh from the embodied world. The events preceding the poem—the circumstances that led to character-Thom’s abstract poisoning—remain vague; however, it is evident that one of their lasting effects is the absence of trust. As character-Thom suggests, “faith is the connective tissue that binds us all/[…]/faith is trust in the world/and mine was torn” (Thom 2019, p. 131). The emphasis on connectivity that comes through the embodied and faith-oriented connective tissues is significant in the broader purview of the collection. In the introduction to I Hope We Choose Love, Thom writes: “I became terrified and paranoid. I stopped trusting people and this thing we call ‘community.’ I stopped trusting myself. […] I lost my faith in community. I lost hope—in social justice, in revolution, in the world” (2019, p. 10). Much like character-Thom in “growing”, Thom expresses a fear that disconnects her from community and faith. However, she notes that “in the midst of despair, I have come to believe that love—the feeling of love, the politics of love, the ethics and ideology and embodiment of love—is the only good option in this time of apocalypse” (Thom 2019, p. 10). In other words, what must follow this disconnect from community, from faith, and from self is a praxis and application of love. In “I Hope We Choose Love: Notes on the Application of Justice”, another chapter from I Hope We Choose Love, Thom considers how the work of justice connects to the work of love and what a love-based justice, one that embraces individual and community healing, might look like. One of the steps that she proposes for moving toward love-based justice is embracing and encouraging radical love. She suggests that “[w]e must love ourselves. We must encourage love—love that is radical, love that digs deep. Love that asks the hard questions, that is ready to listen to the whole story and keep loving anyway” (Thom 2019, p. 91). The praxis and application of love that must follow these disconnects from community, faith, and self, then, necessitates love that is willing to do the work of healing, growth, and transformation. This is not to suggest that this praxis of radical love will remedy this detachment from community, faith, and self. On the contrary, this practice involves “embrac[ing] healing, slow and imperfect though it may be, and turn[ing] instead to love—love strong enough to live without faith. […Love that] embrace[s] growth and constant transformation, like a flower growing in poisonous radiation” (Thom 2019, p. 89). Though Thom’s fictive death in “growing” is a stark reminder of the disconnect that comes with lost faith and relationships turned poisonous, it also offers a way through this death as the poem’s recollective structure gestures toward the growth, hope, and radical love that exist on the other side of life.

The poem’s loose chronology positions the unspecified happenings between character-Thom and the unnamed individual in the past, followed by character-Thom’s poisoning and bodily deterioration, her physical death, and the present of the poem during which she recounts these experiences. The moment of character-Thom’s narration finds her living in the earth. Rather than imagining herself made anew or rebirthed, character-Thom welcomes her fictive death and embraces her posthumous inhabitancy of this underground grave space as a form of living; she is not dead and buried in the earth, she “live[s] in the earth now” (Thom 2019, p. 132; emphasis added). Character-Thom continues to blur the lines between life and death as she urges:

• let us speak of the tree that is sprouting
• from the centre of my throat.
• of the luminescent fungi growing
• on the inside of my skull.
• of the flowers that still bloom
• in every dead part
• of me.
(Thom 2019, p. 132)

As she decomposes, focal points of character-Thom’s body become foundations for new flourishing forms of life: a tree sprouts from her throat, fungi grow inside her skull, and flowers bloom “in every dead part” of her (Thom 2019, p. 132). In effect, character-Thom undergoes two forms of transformation. On the one hand, her physical body deteriorates and becomes a grave-bound corpse. On the other, her spiritual self—“spiritual” being the form of consciousness that brings this narrative into existence—posthumously “survives” this death and occupies a space beyond the grave through the forms of tangible life rooted in the body and the sense of self that character-Thom maintains beyond the corporeal. Allowing character-Thom’s poisoning and loss of faith to function as the end of her existence would relegate her death to that of the Good Trans Character in its disregard for and denial of the agency that death spaces can afford TGNC bodies. However, the latter transformation, wherein character-Thom’s corpse functions in the broader context of the life cycle alongside her continued spiritual existence, brings posthumous life to the T4t Dead Trans Character and draws attention to the potential return of faith, life, and trans meaning-making. Reaching up and through the grave and toward a sense of self that sustains Thom’s role as storyteller, “growing” centers the act of transformation, the verb-based turn to agency that permeates the cycle of life and death.

The posthumous life that Thom creates in “growing” ensures that her transfeminine identity “continues to accrue meaning after the event of death” (Snorton 2017, p. 197). In “Righteous Callings: Being Good, Leftist Orthodoxy, and the Social Justice Crisis of Faith”, an essay from “Part 1: Let Us Live” of I Hope We Choose Love, Thom suggests that “[t]he language of identity politics allows us to describe social power dynamics that would otherwise remain invisible, such as white privilege, shadeism, and transmisogyny” (2019, p. 21). She goes on to discredit the increasingly essentialist fragmentation of identity politics, which assumes “that all people of colour, trans folks, etc., have the same experience, and […] reduces people to a very restricted set of ‘relevant’ identities and erases the rest of their life experiences, while fetishizing the pain of the oppressed” (Thom 2019, p. 21). Advocating for a plurality of identity experiences, Thom’s stance against an essentialist approach to identity politics recalls Kimberlé Crenshaw’s argument that “[t]he problem with identity politics is not that it fails to transcend difference, as some critics charge, but rather the opposite—that it frequently conflates or ignores intragroup differences” (Crenshaw 1991, p. 1242). In a way, “growing” treats the growth from the T4t Dead Trans Character as symbolic of this broader systemic issue, representing the potential for new life to spring from the poisonous words and lost faith that Thom’s personal essays associate with contemporary social justice movements; how, then, might the T4t Dead Trans Character function as a reconciliatory force between trans, feminism, and the so-called “church of social justice”?

Thom’s Falling Back in Love with Being Human, a collection of poetic letters published four years after I Hope We Choose Love, tackles the aforementioned question and addresses how practices and politics of love can unite pain, pleasure, death, and life in trans narratives. In a letter addressed “to the church of social justice”, Thom admits that she has questions: “i have questions about heaven. i have questions about the Revolution. those questions are the same: upon whose bones do you intend to build your paradise?” (2023, pp. 41–42; original emphasis). Like the dual transformations of Thom’s body in “growing”, the emphasis on bones as a structural element in this letter recalls both damaging and desirous narratives of trans life and death. The former suggests that the bones of minoritarian agents—such as trans people and people of color—are requisite components of the foundations that uphold these social structures; the latter, however, argues that because their bones are part of these foundations, these structures are capable of changes that move away from essentialist and exclusionary identity and radical politics. Recognizing the histories of loss, discrimination, and abuse that background minoritarian identities, Thom’s love letter leans into what Eve Tuck characterizes as the “ghostly, remnant quality to desire, its existence not contained to the body but still derived of the body” (Tuck 2009, p. 417). The ghostly qualities of desire that Tuck identifies manifest in the remnants, reminders, shrines, and memorials that commemorate trans life and continue the narratives of those lost into the future. These bones, an undeniable feature of the history of “the Revolution”, as Thom calls it, function as memorials to trans life as they acknowledge the interconnected presence of trans death in narratives of trans life and narratives of trans life in trans death.

This recasting of the bones in “to the church of social justice” recalls, in part, “[t]he double edge of vulnerability” as Anu Koivunen, Katariina Kyrölä, and Ingrid Ryberg discuss in “Vulnerability as a Political Language” (Koivunen et al. 2018, p. 3). They argue that “[t]he double edge of vulnerability concretises in these moments when the feeling of injury gathers affective charge around and for the privileged: vulnerability is no longer (if it ever was) only about weakness or immobilisation, but very concretely about agency” (Koivunen et al. 2018, p. 3). Through their approach, Koivunen, Kyrölä, and Ryberg move away from the assumption that vulnerability is non-agency (2018, p. 5). I echo them in applying agency as indicative of acts of mobilization and resistance and in emphasizing that “practices of resistance cannot […] exist as the opposite to or negation of vulnerability, pain, or even death, but they build on it and draw affective force from it” (Koivunen et al. 2018, p. 9). As they explain, Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics functions in a similar vein. Mbembe suggests that while necropower, “subjugating life to the power of death” (Mbembe 2003, p. 39), connects to the “instrumentalization of death in the current world politics of terror, where some bodies are allowed to live, some are regarded as disposable, and some are reduced to a twilight between life and death, existing in so-called death-worlds” (Koivunen et al. 2018, p. 8), human subjects come into being “through the very confrontation with death” (Koivunen et al. 2018, p. 8). In effect, agency, as an act of mobilization and resistance, and vulnerability come together in Mbembe’s necropolitics to demonstrate the possible resistance that can stem from “the utmost realization of vulnerability—death” (Koivunen et al. 2018, p. 8). The double edge of vulnerability, then, connects “regulation, subjugation, and death, on one hand, and [has the…] power to bring together and mobilise political agency on the other” (Koivunen et al. 2018, p. 9). The Good and T4t Dead Trans Characters take on a similar double edge in their interrelation. Where the Good Trans Character connects “regulation, subjugation, and death”, the T4t Dead Trans Character emphasizes reclamation, re-storying, and the “power to bring together and mobilise political agency” (Koivunen et al. 2018, p. 9). From this framework, instead of interpreting Thom’s question—“upon whose bones do you intend to build your paradise?” (2023, pp. 41–42; original emphasis)—as singularly accusatory of the Revolution and its disposing of minoritarian bodies in the name of greater political or social justice movements, it is possible to interpret it as a complex invitation that asks what histories of political agency and narratives of minoritarian life this system will take as its inspiration, and from whose embodied narratives it will base its practices.

In “to the trans exclusionary radical feminists”, another letter in Falling Back in Love with Being Human, Thom addresses the harm in excluding trans identities from feminist spaces and the danger in claiming, as the epigraph of the letter states, “that the problem of transsexualism would best be served by morally mandating it out of existence” (Janice Raymond in The Transsexual Empire qtd. in Thom 2023, p. 59; original emphasis). Thom opens this letter by writing:

this i promise you: i do not now, nor have i ever, wanted you to stop existing. i do not want to invade or destroy that which is sacred to you. i do not want to steal your children. i do not want to steal your body; i have a body of my own. i do not want you to die. i also do not want to die. dear radical feminist, hand on my heart, this i swear: i am not the end of your world. the world i dream of is big enough for both of us.

(Thom 2023, p. 59)

Although there is not an explicit rendering of the T4t Dead Trans Character in this letter, they are implicit in Thom’s invocation of transmisogynist, and trans-exclusionary feminist calls for trans death. As she promises that she does not wish death upon her cisgender sisters, Thom admits that she “also do[es] not want to die”, this addition acting as a placeholder for the abstract danger of the transfeminine body; recalling that, “[w]hen the TGNC body is more abstract danger than human being, actual trans people immaterialize” (Hsu 2023, p. 265). The addressees of the letter and the language of trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs) draw upon the history of the TERF position as that which

contributed to a decades-long legal exclusion of trans health care from public insurance, inevitably leading to shortened life spans among trans people who were and are disproportionately impoverished. Because this history animates TERF/trans conflict in the present, trans communities look at the persistence of TERF discourse and understandably feel that our “living space is threatened.”

(Awkward-Rich 2017, p. 827)

Therefore, although “to the trans-exclusionary radical feminists” does not make the T4t Dead Trans Character explicit, the letter’s language and references to the history of the TERF movement bring this figure into the spaces between the sentences. In effect, this letter shifts the narrative that the flourishing of trans women and cis women are mutually exclusive. In her repetition of their shared experiences and values—“i do not want to steal your body; i have a body of my own. i do not want you to die. i also do not want to die” (Thom 2023, p. 59)—Thom centralizes the similarities between trans women and cis women without negating their differences. The abstract T4t Dead Trans Character in Thom’s letter is most prominent when she writes: “dear radical feminist, hand on my heart, this i swear: i am not the end of your world. the world i dream of is big enough for both of us” (Thom 2023, p. 59). As Thom promises that she is not the end of the trans-exclusionary radical feminist’s world, so too does the implied T4t Dead Trans Character promise that the trans-exclusionary radical feminist is not the end of the trans-inclusive world that Thom imagines. Taking these two letters together, the tangible bones in “to the church of social justice” and the strategic language in “to the trans exclusionary radical feminists”, the reconciliatory force of the T4t Dead Trans Character manifests as a product of its vulnerable relationship with the Good Trans Character.

I highlight an abstract example of the T4t Dead Trans Character to demonstrate the diverse ways that creative forms of resistance might draw upon, bring attention to, and re-story instances of trans death. I Hope We Choose Love and Falling Back in Love with Being Human frame the T4t Dead Trans Character as a necessary contradiction. A contradiction because it allows the literary loss of trans life to coexist with an unabashed and adamant desire for trans identity, agency, and humanity, and a necessary contradiction as it accomplishes this while navigating the double edge of vulnerability and its conceptual relationship to the Good Trans Character. This coexistence troubles the single story that treats trans death as a conclusion and re-storys reductive narratives about the trans community to privilege the permanence, trans-temporality, and ghostly qualities of trans identities.

3. Re-Storying as Trans Recognition: Posthumous Transness in Death Threat and Memorializing Trans Life in Assigned Male

Where Thom uses vivid natural imagery to render the T4t Dead Trans Character, Vivek Shraya and Ness Lee employ satirical prose and surrealistic artistry to re-imagine, re-story, and re-distribute agency in the hate mail and death threat letters sent to Shraya in 2017 (Shraya and Lee 2019). Death Threat is a comic book inspired by true events and a collaborative project undertaken by Vivek Shraya, the author, and Ness Lee, the artist, with additional colorists Emmett Phan and Hieng Tang. Though this collective form of creation is common in the comics universe, it shifts possible interpretations of the decisions made for the comic. Accounting for the collaborative nature of their professional relationship (Patrick and Thompson 2020), I read the artistic and illustrative decisions in Death Threat as attributed to and influenced, in part, by Shraya, even though she was not an artist on the project. The comic offers vividly illustrated passages that encapsulate Shraya’s lived experience and internal reality through Lee’s artistic interpretation and features two forms of trans death: the spiritual and the physical. Shraya’s aggressor, Nain, calls for both types of death, often aligning Shraya’s imagined spiritual death with her gender identity and insisting that spiritual demise will reveal Shraya’s “physical gender.” This alignment of spirituality and gender constitutes the “good” trans death of the Good Trans Character, as it would, in theory, return Shraya to a false gender binary and comfort essentialist, transmisogynistic ideologies. However, Shraya’s physical death contests this call as it maintains her transfeminine identity without requiring a constant state of protective gender performativity.

Nain vehemently calls for Shraya’s physical and spiritual deaths throughout the comic, writing: “If you go to a forest āśrama the sages there will help you. […] There you will see the earth, the atmosphere, the outer space. You will be absorbed by your physical gender. Likely that is male” (Shraya and Lee 2019, pp. 24–25). This text comes from one of Nain’s emails,2 and the accompanying panels and splash page vividly bring these threats to life (Figure 1). As she imagines herself taken to a forest āśrama and engaging in this forced spiritual “awakening”, Shraya, with her retrospective authorial power, initially slots herself into the single story of the Good Trans Character by allowing herself to undergo the “cisnormative rectification properties of murder” (Da Costa 2022, p. 631). Shraya’s spiritual death aligns with and comforts anti-trans rhetorics by removing her trans identity as it poses an abstract danger to cisgender systems of identification (Hsu 2022a, p. 264). Only in her spiritual death is Shraya’s TGNC body “rectified” and made intelligible to reductive modes of categorization.

In this spiritually posthumous space, Shraya remains physically alive with her eyes open, signaling a retained embodied consciousness, and gazes into the distance, backgrounded by a dark, indistinct figure. As they frame Shraya in this space, this ambiguous entity attempts to absorb Shraya’s transfeminine body and identity and manifest, through her Good Trans Character death, her “physical gender.” This absorption symbolizes Shraya’s spiritual death. Her tense expression suggests a detachment from her sense of self, even if she remains conscious, and the overbearing figure takes a position of control as they background this posthumous spiritual exchange. However, Shraya’s consciousness serves as a form of agency as she denies Nain’s call for absorption by a “physical gender” and refuses to adopt their transmisogynistic call for her passivity. While death is a constant call from Nain, there is no explicit narration of death in the textual narrative. The spiritual and physical deaths Shraya undergoes are identifiable as such through their visualization of severance. Whether it is a forced separation of Shraya and her gender identity or the agentic separation of Shraya’s consciousness and her body, disconnect is the defining element of these deaths. It is through her spiritual death that the abstract danger of Shraya’s transfeminine body and identity immaterializes, perpetuating transphobic and gender essentialist rhetorics.

Although Shraya and Lee appear to lean into the Good Trans Character narrative by giving visual life to Nain’s call for Shraya’s spiritual death, they offer a counternarrative in Shraya’s funeral sequence as it appropriates Nain’s reductive commentary and re-orients Shraya’s death to emphasize the permanence and posthumous potentiality of her trans identity. Following her imagined murder at a Death Threat book launch, Shraya’s body appears in a casket as her mourners follow her to a burial plot. The funeral sequence returns to the stylizations of the forest āśrama and Shraya’s initial role as the Good Trans Character, featuring the same text from Nain’s death threat letter (Figure 2). However, this time, the text is red rather than blue. This color shift suggests two narrative alterations simultaneously. On the one hand, it indicates a time shift as Nain’s letter occurs in the ongoing reality of the text, whereas Shraya’s funeral occupies an imaginative time that is not or is not yet reality. On the other, the red text signifies a change in authorial power; Nain, with their words rendered in blue ink, is no longer the “writer” as Shraya seizes the language of the hate mail, now rendered in red ink, for a trans-affirming re-storying. While the pages’ sequential ordering and structure also return to the initial forest āśrama sequence, the funeral features several environmental changes, most notably centering on Shraya’s physical death rather than an abstracted spiritual death. Shraya lies in a casket with her eyes closed, wearing a red dress, and matching red headband with her hair cascading to frame her upturned face and bare shoulders. In place of the overshadowing figure, the abstract rings of space, planets, and meteors wreath Shraya’s corpse as three of her funeral attendees misgender her, lamenting: “He was such a lovely boy!!”, “I will never forget him!!”, and “I can’t believe he’s gone!” (Shraya and Lee 2019, p. 65; emphasis added). Notably, the textual narrative renders these comments in blue ink, the color of Nain’s commentary, not red ink, the color of Shraya’s narration. This coloration aligns the misgendering that these mourners attempt to force onto Shraya with Nain and their transphobic, gender-essentialist commentary, making their false sentiments echo apart from Shraya’s reclaimed narrative. Even though Shraya pulls directly from Nain’s hate mail and death threats, the shift in the text’s color gestures toward its satirical function. Shraya uses comics’ creative space to take control of the narrative and repurposes Nain’s hate for an affirming creative project. Even as her ambiguous mourners misgender her and align themselves with Nain’s reductive rhetoric, Shraya’s embodied presence denies their verbal assault as she maintains a proud, central position barricaded against their false identifications by the now protective rings of her death space. Though Shraya physically dies in this imaginative sequence, she denies the Good Trans Character that Nain attempts to impose upon her and reappropriates the death space Nain imagines by maintaining her transfeminine appearance and refusing the reductive narrative that her death would return her to a “physical gender.”

The remaining pages of the comic follow Shraya through the burial process and close on her burial place; fresh dirt slowly covers her casket before her amorphous attacker appears and places a final death threat letter on her grave (Figure 3). This concluding sequence gestures toward the posthumous life and power that Shraya possesses as the T4t Dead Trans Character. As Jade Crimson Rose Da Costa argues in “Monstrous Awakenings: Queer Necropolitics in Vivek Shraya and Ness Lee’s Death Threat”,

On the one hand, that the threats continue after Vivek is murdered signals the ever-present nature of their violence: the death threats exist alongside and beyond Vivek’s physical body; they exist both literally and transcendentally, as a discursive force that conditions, but is not conditioned by, her material existence. The implication here is that the threat is located in death-making logics that extend well beyond Vivek’s immediate world.

(Da Costa 2022, p. 643)

As Da Costa proposes, Nain’s apparent need or desire to place this final death threat suggests that Shraya maintains her trans body and identity in and beyond her death. This exchange displaces the abstract danger of Shraya’s transfeminine body onto her transfeminine identity. When left with only an invisible corpse to persecute, an unreality and false permanence underscores any “physical gender” Nain attempts to attribute to Shraya. In place of this false physical dichotomy, there remains the ongoing, posthumous presence of Shraya’s gender identity and its role as a form of self-expression made permanent through her gender-affirming burial.

From her grave, Shraya occupies “that form of life that exceeds life’s meanings and posthumous life” within which trans existence “continues to accrue meaning after the event of death” and gives expression to “trans ghosts that persist and linger, as if not from the past but from the not-so-distant future” (Snorton 2017, p. 197). By orienting trans ghosts as agents of futurity, Snorton and Da Costa suggest that these specters do more than haunt the graves scattered across trans history; they symbolize an “interface of survival” that allows meaning-accrual to “exceed[] life’s meanings” and populate a “posthumous life” (Snorton 2017, p. 197). Rather than limiting trans identification to the body in the grave, Shraya’s visualized posthumous meaning-making recognizes “the exact uncanniness of trans liveability” (Da Costa 2022, p. 635). This uncanniness is the capacity of trans identities and narratives to persist and linger. Since trans identities exist within political and identity discourses, they, as Snorton argues, “continue[] to accrue meaning after the event of death” and, consequently, linger as “trans ghosts” (Snorton 2017, p. 197) whose presences are acts of resistance that “draw affective force” from vulnerability, pain, and death (Koivunen et al. 2018, p. 9). One of the elements that makes Death Threat’s treatment of trans existence so evocative is its grasp on fluid temporalities. Shraya’s narrative is at once informed by the history of discrimination and death faced by the trans community, engaged in present dialogues of trans existence and their presence in trans-inclusive feminist discourses, and aware of the potentials of the future wherein trans and feminism no longer “require the other to inhabit a world incommensurable with its own desires” (Awkward-Rich 2017, p. 838). Trans ghosts, then, function as agents of futurity at the same time as they recognize damaging narratives while moving toward, solidifying, and diversifying complex stories of trans existence.

Death Threat’s application of re-storying as a means of recognizing the trans-temporality of transness and trans identities provides one example of how creative forms of resistance reckon with narratives of trans disposability and attempt to reconcile themselves with transfeminism. However, other creative forms of resistance undertake this work from different, yet equally significant, vantage points. Similar to how Shraya’s lived experiences as a trans woman inform Death Threat, Sophie Labelle’s Assigned Male, a slice-of-life comic, draws upon her experiences as a trans woman with a particular interest in contemporary political and social justice movements surrounding trans identities, queer communities, TERFs, and anti-trans legislation. I am especially interested in Labelle’s work in relation to the T4t Dead Trans Character as Assigned Male, I suggest, embodies what Hillary Chute considers to be a tenet of “[t]he most important graphic narratives”, namely, an “explor[ation of] the conflicted boundaries of what can be said and what can be shown at the intersection of collective histories and life stories” (2008, p. 459). In its reckoning with the narratives of disposability that surround trans bodies and trans lives, Assigned Male uses comics’ “narrative scaffolding”—presenting the visual and the verbal non-synchronously—to force readers to “not only fill[] in the gaps between panels but also work[] with the often disjunctive back-and-forth of reading and looking for meaning” (Chute 2008, p. 452; original emphasis). This creative and political duality or “double vision” (Chute 2008, p. 459) creates space wherein readers engage with the T4t Dead Trans Character and bring this figure to bear on discourses of trans-inclusive feminism.

Launched in 2014, Assigned Male “follows the everyday lives of transgender girl Stephie and her friends as they negotiate the minefield of being trans and trans-sympathetic in a world often hostile or plain uncomprehending of trans reality” (McGillis 2017). Stephie, the comic’s heroine, “‘is a sarcastic young feminist who doesn’t take s—t from anyone. She’s an encyclopedia on legs, and very witty and articulate’” (Labelle qtd. in McGillis 2017). Labelle’s description of Stephie as a “young feminist” makes clear the potential relationship between trans identities and feminist sentiments and the creation of a trans-inclusive feminist praxis. Although Assigned Male is not autobiographical, it does draw upon Labelle’s lived experiences as a trans woman and on contemporary political, cultural, and social events that impact the trans community, including, for example, the murder of sixteen-year-old trans girl Brianna Ghey. On the afternoon of 11 February 2023, Brianna Ghey was stabbed and murdered in Culcheth Linear Park in Warrington, Cheshire (Hirst 2024). Six days later, on 17 February 2023, Labelle posted “A Matter of Safety”, part of Assigned Male, featuring a memorial for Brianna. In the first three panels of the comic, Stephie stands in the center of the panel, holding a lit candle, the wax slowly dripping down its sides, as an individual moves around her, commenting that “[t]rans people need to chill! Hogwarts Legacy is just a game. No one is out to get you. JK Rowling isn’t even really a transphobe, she has simply been misunderstood. She cares about women’s wellbeing. That’s why biological males shouldn’t be allowed in female spaces. It’s a matter of safety!”3 (Labelle 2023; original emphasis). As the speaker yells that it is “a matter of safety”, the speech bubble encapsulating this text hangs over the final panel, and the scene shifts from its focus on Stephie to the source of her vigil, a memorial to Brianna Ghey complete with the transgender pride flag, a portrait of the young girl, a collection of lit candles, and bouquets of flowers (Figure 4). As the speaker rambles on about trans people and the trans community overreacting to anti-trans sentiments and violence, the visual narrative illustrates Stephie’s eyes falling closed with the weight of her grief as she stands vigil for Brianna.

I do not mean to suggest that Brianna Ghey’s murder is in and of itself a manifestation of or “necessary” for the T4t Dead Trans Character. On the contrary, I am interested in considering how Labelle’s comic balances memorializing Brianna’s life and recognizing the weight of her murder with a refusal to reduce trans lives to their endings. This balance, I argue, manifests in the tactful way that Labelle puts the speaker’s reductive anti-trans remarks into conversation with the visual moments of Stephie’s vigil at Brianna’s memorial. The irony that these elements of the comics medium create through their interaction is palpable as the speaker’s commentary on women’s safety not only fails because of its exclusion of trans women in this broad invocation of “women” but also in its blindness to the realities of the trans community. Placed in a non-synchronous relationality, the textual and visual elements of Labelle’s comic require readers to fill in the gaps between the panels, transitioning from encapsulated moment to moment, at the same time as they partake in the “disjunctive back-and-forth of reading and looking for meaning” (Chute 2008, p. 452; original emphasis). Labelle does not deny the magnitude of Brianna’s murder, nor does she seek to draw a silver lining around the story of a trans life cut short. However, in memorializing Brianna’s life and ironizing false yet popularized anti-trans narratives and sentiments, the comic highlights the inherent harmful untruth of these anti- and trans-exclusive positions, forcing readers to take a critical position and refusing to let Brianna’s murder feed the flame of anti-trans violence.

As stories such as Brianna’s remind us, there is a historic and ongoing relationship between trans people and premature death. November 20, Transgender Day of Remembrance (TDOR), is a standing moment “that honors the memory of transgender people whose lives were lost in acts of anti-transgender violence” (GLAAD 2019). Gwendolyn Ann Smith started TDOR in 1999 “as a vigil to honor the memory of Rita Hester, a transgender woman who was killed in 1998. The vigil commemorated all the transgender people lost to violence since Rita Hester’s death, and began an important tradition that has become the annual Transgender Day of Remembrance” (GLAAD 2019). One of Labelle’s comics commemorating TDOR addresses how trans communities “live with the constant threat of a sudden global reckoning” and makes the powerful observation that TDOR reminds us “that the clock ticks faster for trans lives” (Labelle 2022; original emphasis). In this comic, also part of the Assigned Male canon, the text floats above Stephie and her friend, Ciel, as they walk along a suburban street. It appears like fog or a rain cloud, hanging over their heads as they meditate on the significance of TDOR (Figure 5). Although these fog-like clouds are not connected to either of the character’s mouths via the tails which usually accompany speech bubbles in comics, it is safe to assume that Stephie is the speaker, based on how her mouth opens and shifts in motion across the panels whereas Ciel’s mouth remains closed. In the second panel, Ciel’s face reads as shocked or surprised, as their eyebrows raise, and they turn their eyes toward Stephie. In the accompanying text, which evokes this response from Ciel, Stephie stresses that “liberation has yet to come, and that trans people, especially trans women of color, are only ever allowed to exist under certain conditions” (Labelle 2022; original emphasis). Stephie goes on to link the shifting nature of the conditions trans people must navigate to transphobic backlash. While, on the one hand, this language may be interpreted as defeatist, on the other, I suggest, it opens space for potential change. For example, Stephie’s emphasis on the “constant threat of a sudden global reckoning” (Labelle 2022; original emphasis) does not have to be, necessarily, anti-trans in nature. It may gesture, instead, toward trans-affirming change rather than the overhanging threat of anti-trans conditions. As the friends walk down the street, the panels slowly change their focus, panning upward over their heads, the tops of the buildings along the street, and eventually stopping on the sky. This rising motion re-imagines the potential reading of the clouds of text and their positioning. It shifts their overhanging weight to a form of enveloping as they rise above the narrative and gesture toward the hope for something better, becoming a potentially positive omen, rather than a negative one.

This is not to suggest that TDOR should not also be a time of reflection, commemoration, and mourning for the loss, abuse, and death that backgrounds the trans community. As Stephie stresses: “the clock ticks faster for trans lives. Too much blood has been shed already to afford waiting for liberation. My rage is forged in death” (Labelle 2022; original emphasis). This text forms much of the final panel, the background of which is the first instance in the comic where the setting is fully above Stephie, Ciel, and the street they walk along, resting on the stormy grey clouds in the sky. A damage-centric reading may suggest that what Stephie proposes is that trans death is an inevitable feature of trans liberation, that death marks all trans lives, and that TDOR serves as a morbid reminder that death waits for no trans person but rather actively seeks them out in the form of anti-trans violence. However, a desire-based reading may interpret Stephie’s comments about trans liberation, death, and rage as walking alongside one another, much like she and Ciel walk together along the street. From a desire-based re-framing, Stephie’s treatment of death, and its rising above the individual, the community, and the environment, becomes a site of reclamation and her rage as necessary for and indicative of the hope, agency, and self-determination of the T4t Dead Trans Character. In this reframed treatment of trans death, Labelle’s comic recognizes the transformative potential of trans existence and echoes Kai Cheng Thom in its urgent call for renouncing narratives of trans disposability and investing in the dignity of trans life. As a shining example of a young transgender feminist, Stephie’s political awareness and engagement with trans liberation movements offers a blueprint for what a relationship between trans and feminism can look like and the changes they can inspire in literature, culture, and politics. In a way, the death of the T4t Dead Trans Character acts as a binding force between trans and feminism, offering an inclusive praxis from which trans-inclusive feminism can bridge the gap between these two positionalities, recognizing that “although the wound remains open, we remain attached both because the promise of closure is not broken, […] and most importantly because something usable is produced by the attachment” (Awkward-Rich 2017, p. 839).

4. Conclusions

Even though they approach the Good Trans Character and trans death from distinctive literary mediums and niche generic intersections, each of these authors and creators effectively re-story trans death to repudiate the single story of the Good Trans Character, embrace complex stories of the T4t Dead Trans Character, and reclaim normalized trans death spaces to locate hope, desire, and agency in a trans-inclusive feminist praxis. The deaths in these texts and the T4t Dead Trans Characters they bring into being grapple with the abstract danger and demise that often relegate TGNC bodies to requisite grave spaces. While none of these authors and creatives deny the presence and power of death in narratives of trans communities, fictive or otherwise, their insistence on death as a means of re-imagining agency, power, and identity permanence for these minoritarian agents speaks to the capacity of re-storying “to create counternarratives that assert, I exist, I matter, and I am here” (Thomas and Stornaiuolo 2016, p. 332; original emphasis). This assertive and agentic space-claiming, especially as it connects to re-storying practices, is the principal function of the T4t Dead Trans Character.

While stories of trans life without instances of trans death hold a necessary place in complexifying narratives of trans identities, the re-storying of death undertaken by the T4t Dead Trans Character allows storytellers and creatives to re-orient and reclaim the narrative spaces that transmisogynistic structures and ideologies have historically, and continually, used to limit TGNC bodies and identities to “necessary” or “inevitable” death. Though I have addressed the T4t Dead Trans Character as a primarily literary agent, the transformative and care-centric potential of this figure expands beyond the borders of any literary binding. As Vox Jo Hsu argues in “Irreducible Damage: The Affective Drift of Race, Gender, and Disability in Anti-Trans Rhetorics”, “[t]he worldbuilding of trans communities offers proliferate examples of how shared desires and (com)passions can rally coalitions responsive to the material realities of structurally marginalized peoples” (2022a, p. 74). As the T4t Dead Trans Character repopulates popular cultural and literary spheres with trans-affirming and trans-agentic narratives, so too does it draw attention to and “intervene in hostile rhetorics that stoke prejudicial animosities […] and nurture more restorative intimacies” (Hsu 2022a, p. 74). As much as literature often mirrors social, cultural, and political realities, it holds the potential to change them, intervening in the liminal spaces that exist between the imaginative and the real, the literary and the literal. The T4t Dead Trans Character acts as a way for trans folks to hold, in and through literature, “individual and collective hurt that do[es] not weaponize their pain”, and answers Hsu’s hope for trans folks’ refusal “to be defined or contained by other people’s hatred” (Hsu 2022a, pp. 266–67). I encourage future work in this area to consider how the T4t Dead Trans Character manifests in re-storyings of transmasculine and transandrogynous death and to investigate how complex re-storyings probe and depict the diverse realities of embodied trans experiences.

The T4t Dead Trans Character, as a trans-inclusive feminist figure, opens literary and literal space for the reclaiming and re-storying of trans death, recognizes trans suffering, and refuses to relegate trans identities to narratives of death purported by transmisogynistic and trans-exclusive radical feminist ideologies. In the desirous, fatal re-storyings of Kai Cheng Thom, Vivek Shraya and Ness Lee, and Sophie Labelle’s creative forms of resistance, trans personhood and trans death become interlinked and kindred undertakings, operating in and beyond the grave to actively reinstate and re-imagine complexity in trans stories. These narratives necessarily gesture beyond the page to critique social justice culture, radical trans politics, the persecution of trans identities, the false reinforcement of a reductive gender binary, and the perpetuation of anti-trans violence. In so doing, they make instances of literary trans death indicative of the permanence of trans identities, creating a trans-inclusive feminist praxis that is integrally invested in the dignity and indispensability of all human life.