A random collection of over 1910 books and audiobooks authored by or about my transgender, intersex sisters, and gender-nonconforming persons all over the world. I read some of them, and I was inspired by some of them. I met some of the authors and heroines, some of them are my best friends, and I had the pleasure and honor of interviewing some of them. If you know of any transgender biography that I have not covered yet, please let me know.
1991,
German,
Jayne-Ann Igel,
Original title: "Fahrwasser: Eine innere Biografie in Ansätzen" (Fairway: An inner biography in its beginnings) by Jayne-Ann Igel.
According to Mathilda Cullen, Jayne-Ann Igel was born in Leipzig, 1954, in the German Democratic Republic. Fahrwasser was her second poetic work, inaugurating her diaristic style with its publication in 1991. It was the first book she published after she came out (as a transgender woman) and changed her name as the Berlin Wall fell around her. She burst onto the samizdat literary scene of East Germany with a dysphoric style that meditates on fragments of language that approach her as strange, as a stranger.
She writes, “I think everything I’ve written so far is only because Jayne-Ann had kept quiet, kept withdrawing;” noting that “no matter how my language might change, internally, essentially, in its quality, it will not become unknowable, for it draws its life from the same identity I have assumed, it’s been with me for a long time, it’s the reason I move.”
Wolfgang Hilbig writes in the forward, “When Jayne-Ann Igel travels home to come out to her parents, during the Christmas holidays, she is torn back by language. During this trip, she thinks back on sentences that emerge with a diction almost entirely masculine… alienated to the point of paralysis.” Igel’s work revolves around this Rückkehr, what returns to her, what she returns to, turning around, wading through the halls of memory to find what ruins remain, what is left and what is gone.
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