Gaining access to hormone therapy is often lifesaving for trans women but, as I’ve learned, fraught with invasive exams, questionnaires, and a dehumanizing medicalization of gender and body.
As a trans woman reader, I take this scene to be a reflection of the medical violence and exploitation which is visited on trans bodies as we negotiate healthcare. Crocodile as a literal crocodile, with the other patients in his office presented as various animals as well. The fairy-tale rendering of this interaction presents Dr.
He inspects the protagonist’s body before proscribing hormones, an invasive exam that leads up to an implied forced sexual exchange between the protagonist and Dr. Crocodile’s interest in trans women is sexual and predatory. Crocodile, a trans-friendly doctor who is willing to prescribe hormones to trans women. In one notable scene in the book, Kai Cheng has her protagonist encounter Dr. Kai Cheng’s fantastical lens also lets her observations strike deeper than a direct approach would allow. This approach to confronting reality is common across cultures and narrative traditions, as it allows for different access points into subject matter which could be painful without the glaze of wonder over them. Folklore and fairy tales often function as exaggerated reflections of reality, allowing listeners to explore complex real-world issues through a fantastical world. Populated by mythical beings such as witches, mermaids, ghosts, and anthropomorphic characters, Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars is not a memoir in the traditional sense. Commonly known as fairy tales or Märchen (wonder tales) in the Western world and zhiguai in the Chinese literary tradition, Kai Cheng’s work is a ground-breaking urban trans girl fairy tale. I cannot think of a book quite like this one, but Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars is drawn from an ancient tradition of storytelling. If the title wasn’t enough, the decadent pink cover art of knives, cake slices, cigarettes, and mermaid tails firmly displays the book’s origin in the fantastical. The title should be enough to signal to readers that what follows is a conflated narrative of personal exploration through a landscape of mythological archetypes and fairy tale wonder. Published by Metonymy Press in 2016, Kai Cheng Thom’s first book is titled Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl’s Confabulous Memoir.
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