Revisiting “Silence of the Lambs” in the Age of Trans Backlash

Sometimes you are reading a book—not even one by a well-known transphobic children’s author—and are struck, halfway through or near the end, by a bit of transphobia. Sometimes it’s load-bearing: Both Helen Oyeyemi’s Boy, Snow, Bird and Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Book of Joan end with revelations that their villain characters are caricatures of trans masculinity (Oyeyemi’s, in particular, “resolves” this by having the primary characters agree to tell him he does not need to be trans anymore). Sometimes it’s more by omission than by the letter itself: In Yoko Tawada’s Scattered All Over the Earth, a non-medically transitioning woman named Akash is treated by every character as a man without correction or regard for her sense of self. Every time, it’s disappointing. Not only that the author would think that these ideas are okay, or that they would make it through the editorial process, but that t...