The Book That Made Me Trans: The World of the You

When I was invited to be a part of this festival, I felt a good deal of imposter syndrome. There was a nagging voice in my head asking over and over: Am I trans enough?

To some degree I take shelter and safety in the privilege of being more or less invisible—readily perceived as a good Asian girl; a representative of either the model minority; or the Chinese virus; or, more recently, talked about by white warm-water drinking influencers who declare, I’m in a very Chinese time of my life.

For me, being non-binary is the way I protest against these ready-made perceptions, the way I grapple with and assert sovereignty over my own body which I have always felt to be symbolic against my will. Being non-binary is how I assert my body on my own terms.

I went through the full pipeline, beginning with my assigned pronouns she/her, and then to she/they. Then, realising I liked how I felt about myself using and hearing gender neutral pronouns, I progressed further to they/she. Finally I felt that the ‘she’ was more for other’s convenience than for myself. Now I use they/them.

I remember trying to explain these transitions to my Chinese mum over the phone, and she thought they were indicative of sexuality, that she/they and they/she represented my bisexuality. When I went full they/them the first thing she asked was, so do you still like boys?

Over time, my mum and I found resonances: the spoken third person pronoun in Chinese is always Ta, a gender-neutral pronoun. My mother then told me my given name Xiao Le—which means little happy or little music—is also gender neutral. My mum told me that the Boddhisatva of my popo, Guanyin, who Popo says is the one who swaddled me to earth, is neither male nor female; Guanyin is Guanyin, Or, as my mum tried to put it, she is also a they.

My mum tries. And of course, many members of the Asian diaspora can attest to the difficulties, or perhaps impossibilities, of communicating queerness to Asian families. Though my mother never misgenders me when she is talking to me and with me rather than about me. Since I was little, what she most commonly calls me is the gender-neutral—Baobei—which means my treasure or my darling.

The prompt, ‘the book that made me trans’ has left me thinking about which books leave space for me as a reader—the books that also talk to me and with me—particularly in politics or revolutionary texts which were often written in a time where ‘human’ was interchangeable with ‘man’; or else, even today, too readily and comfortably assume an us vs them dichotomy.

Specifically, I’ve been thinking about the power and possibilities of the pronoun ‘you’; the pronoun we use most often in life when we are talking to each other face to face, eye to eye, and yet the pronoun that is most often neglected in writing; the second person address is so rare that it is often seen as a gimmick.

However, I feel a great deal of freedom in the ‘you’. For me, it represents the difference being talked about in third person; as well as talked over through an assumed us vs them. The ‘you’ involves neither being talked about nor talked over; it involves talking with someone, the way I am talking with all of you, face to face, eye to eye.

Coincidentally, while looking through my past pieces of writing, I came across an unpublished story I wrote in university, inspired by my first sapphic crush. The story included the paragraph:

“Perhaps it all started with the dream, a few nights ago, of a boy I didn’t love. He was tying my hair back with a ribbon so tenderly that I began to weep. I couldn’t help but feel that this is somehow connected — that this weeping is of a familiar weight in my chest as the low red bloom which seeps along the horizon. I couldn’t help but think of you.”

I remembered that my tutor had assumed that the story was one from the perspective of a girl speaking towards an unnamed boy. I felt frustrated, and re-read the story, and realised I never actually defined the gender of any character except for the boy in the dream—that the direct address of the central ‘I’ to a ‘you’ is inherently genderless.

While re-reading Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks, I took particular notice of the ending lines. The text was indeed working in a time where ‘human’ was interchangeable with ‘man’; though I noticed Fanon does leave an opening for readers who don’t find themselves in the word ‘man’. Whether intentional or unintentional, it is there—Judith Butler called this turn in pronoun ‘the most insurrectionary of his speech acts’. This insurrectionary speech act is Fanon’s use of the second person ‘You’. Fanon writes,

“Was my freedom not given to me then in order to build the world of the You?”

Suddenly, in the pronoun ‘you’, I felt I was finally being addressed by Fanon not as an assumed man, but as a member of a shared community, an equal in conversation, eye to eye.

Of course, one cannot speak of Fanon without speaking of resistance; particularly in these times, resistance against the mass slaughter of western imperialism and colonialism, as we have all seen in almost three years of live-streamed genocide of Palestinians committed by Israel.

I felt a satisfying resonance between Fanon’s ‘world of the you’ and the book Perfect Victims by Mohammed El-Kurd, a Palestinian writer and poet. El-Kurd writes, “the Palestinian condition is the human condition. Palestine is a microcosm of the world: wretched, raging, fraught and fragmented. On fire. Stubborn. Ineligible. Dignified. The lens we lend the Palestinian reveals how we see each other, how we see everything else.”

In El-Kurd’s words, we see a world of the ‘you’ that can only exist if we look every Palestinian in the eye—both those who are gentle and those who are wretched, raging, fraught and fragmented. Those who are fighters. Because looking the Palestinian in the eye means looking each other in the eye.

Strikingly, El-Kurd ends his book with a joke, an anecdote of a joke, where a Palestinian man addresses an Israeli soldier who has stationed a military tank outside his home. The man walks up to the soldier and says, “How many times did I tell you not to park your tank in my driveway?”

I’d like to finish with a passage by Mohamed el-Kurd from Perfect Victims, which is a must-read in our times. El-Kurd writes,

“The choice to be irreverent at the podium liberates both the speaker and their audience, albeit briefly. In the pause between the laughter that follows a sardonic observation, something sacred takes place in the unconscious. The grand stage becomes an intimate living room, and the tragedy at hand, whatever it may be, becomes a family affair. The speaker exiles the prestige of the podium from his mind, discarding the role he was coerced into rehearsing, proclaiming what he had been taught to whisper. The spectators are, for a moment, implicated in the spectacle, polluted by its imperfections, in on the joke. Something sacred occurs in the unconscious: a world without pretenses where we look each other in the eye.”

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

Xiaole Zhan (they/them) (詹小乐) is a Chinese-Aotearoa writer and composer based in Naarm. Their work features in Auckland University Press’s New Poets 11. They are a 2025 Creative New Zealand Fellowship recipient, a 2025 Red Room Poetry Varuna Fellowship recipient, the 2024 Kat Muscat Fellow, as well as the winner of the 2023 Kill Your Darlings Non-Fiction Prize. Their name in Chinese means ‘Little Happy’, but can also be read as ‘Little Music’.