The Book That Made Me Trans: A Reflection in Oz

Reading widely as a child is travel without a map. You stick mostly to familiar streets, yet sometimes you stumble into an alley that is not exactly forbidden, but not exactly safe either. Thus I remember my deep regret after sneaking a peek inside Stephen King’s Skeleton Crew at an age too tender for auto-cannibalism. In my defence, there was a toy monkey on the cover.

But if you read and read, sometimes you find hidden gardens as well. Places of refuge that you never knew you needed until you found them. And for me, the most delightful such detour as I travelled my parents’ library came from the first sequel to The Wizard of Oz – L Frank Baum’s TheMarvelous Land of Oz, published in 1904.

 I had enjoyed The Wizard of Oz movie as much as the next kid, but the film that really did it for me was the sequel from 1985 – Return to Oz. People of a certain age will know what I’m talking about. Return to Oz was a nightmarish phantasmagoria where Dorothy faced electroshock therapy, homicidal wheeled clowns and a sorceress who pulled off her own head while threatening to do the same to Dorothy. This is what was marketed to children in the 80s, and I loved it.

I asked my Dad if Return to Oz was also based on a book and he said yes. In fact there were fourteen Oz books, in fact we had them on our shelves, and in fact Return to Oz was based on a combination of books 2 and 3: The Marvelous Land of Oz and Ozma of Oz. This was news to me. Dad’s shelves stretched far above a child’s reach, and Baum was hidden up in the rafters. But a short ladder-climb later, I was settling down with the Marvelous Land of Oz.

I remember the cover – the Scarecrow and Tin Woodman holding hands, as good chums do. But centring those familiar friends was just a marketing ploy, because in a way I can’t imagine any publisher accepting today, Baum had jettisoned Dorothy, the Wizard and any comfortable connection to our world. Instead, the Marvelous Land of Oz told a strange new fable of feminist rebellion. Armed with knitting needles and led by the irrepressible General Jinjur, the girls of Oz overthrow the Scarecrow’s rule and set up a short-lived matriarchy until they are scattered by a handful of mice. This is all witnessed by a Tom Sawyer-type lad called Tip, who runs away from his abusive guardian, the witch Mombi, and goes on an arbitrary tour of Oz with an ever-growing stable of ‘queer’ companions.

So far, so good. I liked the funny Jack Pumpkinhead whose pumpkin keeps falling off. But really, the book would have faded without a trace from my memory were it not for the bananas penultimate chapter, in which Glinda the Good informs Tip that he is actually a princess.

You see, the reason that the Scarecrow and Jinjur are tussling over the throne is that the rightful heir, Princess Ozma, has been missing since she was a baby. Glinda tracks baby Ozma to Mombi the Witch, and after a surprisingly dark interrogation in which Glinda threatens to murder her (Wicked didn’t come from nothing), Mombi confesses her crime: she had transformed baby Ozma into the boy Tip, whom she then made her servant.

Reading this reveal again, thirty years later, I can still remember the way my stomach seized up. Tip, the boy like me, was really a girl like me. A princess, ensorcelled so nobody around her would see the truth. For the first time in my life, I was reading a fantasy that matched my own fantasies.

The Land of Oz didn’t make me trans, and it didn’t give me a vocabulary to talk about my pain (except the vocabulary of potions, with which I was already quite familiar). But at a time when trans people were culturally invisible, it gave me something more important – my first reflection. 

What happened to Tip wasn’t a perfect match, for all that. Unlike me, Tip is very happy as a boy, and the news of his transformation comes as a terrible psychic shock. He is coerced into returning to his female form, and as soon as he has done so Baum pours on the femininity in a way that implies that the Tip we knew is gone, and the dutiful Ozma has emerged from where he stood. In this way, the story also presaged my later anxieties around the cultural narratives of trans death-and-rebirth. I didn’t want to become a radically new person, I wanted the world to see the person I already was. 

I took the book to primary school and showed the ending to everyone, “haha, how weird is that?” I would ask with nervous excitement. I think I wanted someone to ask me back how I’d feel about becoming a princess. Nobody did, but that was okay. Because for the first time, my desire had been spoken aloud. Safely, because like all real things, it was in a book.

Why did Baum write this book? He was America’s darling, the man who wrote the Gilded Age into fable; but though outwardly respectable he returned again and again to themes of gender play across his work. Like his most famous creation, the Wizard, Baum was a bit of a humbug, and a bit of a mystery. Perhaps he reveals himself most clearly in the misanthropic words he puts in the Scarecrow’s mouth:

“That proves you are unusual,” returned the Scarecrow. “and I am convinced that the only people worthy of consideration in this world are the unusual ones. For the common folks are like the leaves of a tree, and live and die unnoticed.”

Baum was an unusual man, but for a transgender kid living ninety years later – he was the guy who noticed.

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

Jack Nicholls (they/them) is a British-Australian essayist and speculative fiction writer living in Melbourne. They write with equal gusto about housing crises and haunted houses, capitalism and clones, and are particularly drawn to the zone where the implausibly real meets the fictionally plausible. Their fiction has been published in venues including Grist, Award Winning Australian Writing and Tor.com, and you can follow them at their Substack newsletter, Letters from Jack.