Richard Walker, ‘A Curious Child’

To mark today’s publication of our new edition of Richard Walker’s A Curious Child, we are reproducing the Introduction to the book written by Dr Kit Heyam, author of Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender. Richard will be at the Amaurea Press stall at the Oxford Indie Book Fair this Sunday 23rd November, signing books and chatting with readers.

By Kit Heyam

‘We are all amateurs in this,’ Ronny, the youngest narrator of A Curious Child, reflects towards the end of the novel. ‘The way in which we try to detect motives or construct them for ourselves where maybe they don’t exist. Some difference between detect and construct. But who is to say where fact (detection necessary) shades into hypothesis (construction obligatory) in the matter of motivation? If this is true for oneself, and I find it so, how much harder it is when talking about others, even those we claim to know well. [. . .] The words, the explanation of my alienation as one of the motivations for my behaviour are a construction for you, doubtless later on for the courts and anyone else who requires classifications of what I’ve done, am doing.’

In her knowledge that her trans narrative is inevitably a construction for others who don’t share her experience – lawyers, medics, relatives, readers – Ronny is markedly more self-aware than her fellow protagonists. The family at the centre of A Curious Child tell themselves, and each other, stories about their motivations and their selves which are only intermittently honest, often prioritising the ‘construct’ of a respectable English family over the ‘fact’ of a messy tangle of unspoken secrets and unshared feelings; Ronny, though she can’t see through all of her relatives’ lies, certainly sees the necessary construction of self-narration for what it is. But this passage about the impossibility of translating a trans person’s motivations to transition into a coherent narrative also reflects a self-awareness on the part of Richard Walker, as a cis man writing a trans woman’s story in a period when this was a rarity.

A Curious Child was first published in 1989. This was long before the Equality Act 2010 gave trans people protection from discrimination; long before the Gender Recognition Act 2004 gave some of us the chance of privacy, and some of us the ability to marry. In a sense, every trans person in the UK lived with the shadow of April Ashley, on whom Ronny is modelled. (Walker was inspired by Duncan Fallowell’s 1982 authorised biography, April Ashley’s Odyssey): it was Ashley’s 1970 divorce case, Corbett v. Corbett, that had stripped trans people of the right to change our birth certificates, and with it the right to dignity, privacy and (for many) employment. Yet 1989 was also long before our contemporary anti-trans moral panic, which now threatens those rights again, and with renewed hostility. For a cis writer in 1989 to write a portion of their novel from the perspective of a trans woman – even more so for her to be a (mostly) sympathetic trans woman, whose life has been not ruined but started by transition – was both more and less risky than today.

It was also, in a way, an entirely natural thing to do. As Walker wrote to me, his was ‘the generation which grew up with David Bowie’: ‘a time of experimentation with identities, including sexual ones’. The disapproval of his father, ‘a military man through and through’, when he started to grow his hair long and chose to study English at university, led him to feel a natural affinity for others who pushed against social constructs – including gender – they were assigned at birth.

Ronny, then, is a timely character, the product of a writer whose firm belief in the possibility of gender fluidity was forged through the 1960s and 1970s counterculture. But she is also in many ways out of time. At a moment when trans people were self-organising to support each other and fight for our rights – the UK’s first national trans conference was held in Leeds in 1974 – she has no trans community of her own. At a time when she could have sought medical transition in the UK, she travels to Egypt, where her Orientalist views of the Muslim community that surround her also mark her out as old-fashioned. She understands her transness in a quasi-psychoanalytic way, suggesting that perhaps it derives from her sense of fatherlessness or the overbearing nature of her mother: ‘by the time I am able to recall – about three years old – she had so enclosed me in her world that father, my father anyway, simply ceased to exist. If there were men they were viewed from within mother’s compound and her stance at the gate was as protective as that of any soldier.’

Ronny is born in August 1945: a symbol of a postwar, perhaps even postmodern order. In some ways her trans existence is a rupture for her intensely English, traditional family, shaped and constrained by the matriarch Emily’s strong views on class and stronger views on propriety. In other ways, her transness – and the old-fashioned way in which she lives it – is the logical continuation of her family’s circumstances. Gender in the novel, especially masculinity, hurts people: having observed and been shaped by the way that military masculinity repeatedly obstructs emotional connection (transforming even Edward’s kindness into brutality by the end of the war, and devastating Cyril’s life), Ronny’s transition is perhaps the only way she could break free of a similar fate. Likewise, biology in the novel is rarely a synonym for ‘reality’: just as many people’s fathers are not their biological fathers, so sex assigned at birth is neither necessary nor sufficient to make a character a man or woman. And Ronny’s isolation as a trans adult is an understandable consequence of her family’s consistent inability to build emotional connection without restraint or lies. Her transness, then, may be postwar, but is not new or ahistorical: it is intimately tangled up with her family’s pre- and post-war history.

I found myself invited to write this introduction as a trans person, a writer, a historian and a literary scholar. As a trans reader, I didn’t find A Curious Child easy. We first know the trans character through the pain of her surgery. She gets misgendered by other characters for most of the book. The way her surgeons correspond with her in the run-up to her surgery is grotesque. We have little opportunity to know her trans life; only that she feels herself, in the aftermath of her surgery, without love. She is flawed, frustrating and racist, exoticising Muslims (and Asian and African countries more broadly) as somehow unrestrained in a way that English people could never be.

But as a trans historian and literary scholar, I found the novel essential. It is unusual, and valuable, in being a 1980s historical novel by a cis person with a trans narrator; more so in being a broadly sympathetic one. One of its touching elements is that, in a family who leave so much unspoken, Virginia’s unspoken feelings about her daughter’s transition are often feelings of acceptance: ‘It was a matter of time and Ronald’s own will’, nothing more. It is an important historical document of how the period that produced (and was produced by) Bowie could produce a novel like this one. It is a realistic depiction of how a trans girl raised in a stiflingly English environment in which no one talked about anything (least of all gender, even though in some ways gender has been the most significant force to shape their lives) might come to fetishise non-English cultures; Ronny’s thoughts on Muslims and Egypt strongly echo the attitudes Aren Z. Aizura analyses in his 2018 book Mobile Subjects: Transnational Imaginaries of Gender Reassignment. It is a visceral defence of transsexual joy: I read with emotion the nurse Leila’s speech on how transition can help us to move beyond mere ‘survival’, and her earnest conviction that ‘if you leave here a person who is more in tune with herself then you will make the world a better place’; the fact that medical transition makes the world a better place is one that, in a world increasingly populated by people who want to ban it, we can never be reminded of too often. It is also, not at all incidentally, beautifully written: the way Walker crafts patchworks of images, as memories give way to memories give way to memories, reminded me powerfully of Woolf.

I hope people reading A Curious Child for the first time will take all of this from it. And I hope they will also take this: a reminder that, no matter how impossible politicians and anti-trans activists make it look today, it has actually always been possible for cis people to think of trans people as people, and to try to see the world through our eyes.