The Book That Made Me Trans: Losing the Stealth Life

I am a single man in my late thirties, which is code for I’m lonely. Lonely enough to join a bunch of queer groups in an effort to grow my social life. Book club meets monthly, which means there’s less steady socialising. We meet, discuss books, and bail. It’s awesome, but it’s less likely that I’ll form any connections that may turn into deeper relationships simply due to lack of exposure. Choir, on the other hand, is weekly, and I have high hopes that it might lead to something more, socially speaking.

In both of these groups I’ve been subsumed into the gay men’s clique, which suits me fine, because I’m pretty gay. What I haven’t done at either of these events is mention that I’m also trans. It wasn’t a conscious decision. I didn’t go there with the intent of being stealth. But week after week I found myself continuing to not mention it, even when an easy opportunity to do so arose. I am friendly with the other out trans people in the group, but I remain entrenched with the cis gay men.

That’s a decision I’ve made, and it’s akin to a lot of the decisions I’ve been making ever since it finally clicked that people generally don’t recognise me as trans unless I tell them. And sometimes, even when I do tell them, they don’t get it. They think I’m coming out as non-binary or as trans femme and offer to switch to they/them or she/her pronouns, which is nice, but very mistaken.

The effect of all this is that, day by day, my silence over my trans history has been growing, exacerbated by my peripatetic lifestyle which has seen me moving to new cities and towns on the regular. With each move, I meet new people and they see me as a man, end of story, no preliminary adjectives or qualifiers necessary. They don’t ask me about surgeries or hormones or what my genitals look like. They don’t expect me to be an impromptu representative of the international transgender community. They just see a bloke, and it’s bloody awesome. I’m tasting the stealth life for the first time and I fucking love it. It’s feeding an old fantasy that’s been bubbling away inside of me since I was a little boy reading Tamora Pierce’s Alannah series and dreaming of hiding every female coded bit of me so people would only see what I saw: the boy, now man.

But there’s a problem. Well, there are a lot of problems when you count all the controversies and stressors connected to stealth life. But over and above all that, sits a very practical problem.

I’m a writer and I believe in writing what you know, mostly because my writing is better received when I do that. For example, the last time I tried to write a short story with a cis female main character, the reviewer came back with the comment: is the author a man? Which, while validating in terms of my gender identity, did not boost my writerly confidence. I haven’t tried writing a story with a cis male lead, and I suspect there’s a lot of fear driving that decision: fear that I will receive a similar though inverse comment questioning my masculinity.

In any case, I really leaned into the what-you-know advice for my debut novel. It’s a YA set in outer western Brisbane, where I grew up. It’s set in 2002, when my protagonist is 14 – as I was back in 2002. It draws on Scottish Gaelic culture, which is my own cultural tradition. And the protagonist is also trans male, just like me.

And unlike that old short story with the cis main character, the feedback on this one has been overwhelmingly positive. The unpublished manuscript received a nice collection of plaudits and recently appeared on Reading’s list of most anticipated YA for 2026.

Now, if you’re an observant sort of person, you’ll have noticed that I’ve yet to name my debut novel. And that’s intentional. Because it is the name of my novel which led to my sliding doors moment. You can’t hear this title and not think, ‘Hm, that sounds a little trans.’ And since cis authors don’t tend to write books with trans main characters anymore – at least, not unless they are British cis women of a certain age and worldview – merely admitting the title of my book is as good as a declaration of my own transness. Not something I’d considered when I began to build my new stealth lifestyle among my cis gay peers. However, this mind-blowing level of naivety was now reaching its expiration date.

Picture this: I’m at choir and walking towards a man who’s also in my book club—which I am now realising may be a problem because he would’ve heard the announcement I made at our last meeting. I hadn’t planned to make this announcement. It popped out because the group had been discussing which books they wanted to read in the second half of the year, and a sudden rush of boldness saw me suggesting my own book, which is coming out in May. I didn’t think about the consequences, perhaps because I was so overwhelmed with the reality of outing myself as a writer in a room full of critical readers. Book clubs, I have discovered, are ruthless spaces, and the idea of these folks reading my book is both thrilling and beyond terrifying. Indeed, I’m so buzzed following my announcement that it’s not until I arrive at choir some days later and am walking towards that lovely elderly gentleman that I realise what should have been patently obvious all along: I no longer have any chance of being stealth in this community.

And I feel so foolish, because it never really was a possibility. The moment I decided to write from my own lived experience, any opportunity I may have had to be stealth ended. Because I was never going to be able to maintain my silence over the different parts of my life, to sit in book club and never mention my own book. And once the truth is out there, it’s out there. Life is not so easy to separate into neat parts, where here, I’ll be trans, and there, I’ll be stealth. It’s far more murky and intermingled, particularly in my current home city of Brisbane, where two degrees of separation is the norm thanks to the fact that everyone seems to know my mum.

With a sinking heart, I approach the man as he shares my great news with all choir members in hearing range. I do my best to play my part, the role of the excited debut author, as he claps me on the shoulder and asks: ‘What’s the book’s title again?’

‘The Boy Maeve,’ I reply, every word bittersweet.

‘What’s that?’ asks another man.

‘The Boy Maeve,’ I say again, louder, and this time everyone hears.

Am I imagining the double takes? The significant looks? The side eye? Probably, because my gay pals are nothing but kind in their enthusiasm and polite interest. I smile and nod and hide away all my melancholy as best as I’m able.

I’m self-aware enough to know that my desire to be stealth is likely a product of internalised transphobia, and maybe a dash of fear connected to the way the world is moving. Intellectually, I know I’m not monstrous. I know there’s nothing shameful about bodies like mine, histories like mine. But also, I spent decades of my life running from my truth, and that sort of thing leaves a mark.

A mark that my dear protagonist Maeve does not bear, because I gave Maeve all my transness but almost none of my self-doubt. I let my Maeve fly in a way I’m not sure I yet have.

Maeve knows who he is, and I like to think that when he’s in his late thirties and feeling lonely, he’ll also join the book club and the choir and gravitate towards the gay clique. But unlike me, when some lovely man wants to share the news of Maeve’s success – assuming Maeve too has dabbled in book writing – Maeve won’t feel his heart drop. He won’t cringe internally and grieve missed chances. No. Maeve’s heart will soar because he knows he’s being celebrated by his peers and that’s all there is to it. He’s a man who wrote a book standing amid men who like to do a bit of singing on a Tuesday night.

This is a revised contribution to the The Book That Made Me Trans storytelling night at the 2026 Trans Book Festival.

Kai Ash (he/him) was raised in Yuggera country, Brisbane region, Queensland, where he grew up amid bush-covered ranges. Once he was old enough, he set off to explore the world: Europe, the Middle East and Oceania. He studied gender, language, law and psychology before returning home again. Kai’s work has been shortlisted in The Ampersand Prize, Adaptable, Lane Cove Literary Awards and Melbourne Lord Mayor’s Creative Writing Awards, and he was a mentee in the ASA/CA Award Mentorship Program. The Boy Maeve is his first published novel.