The Warm Pink Jelly Express Train was a very difficult book to write. Compared to my previous one, Poaching the River, it required profound reflection and much research.
Poaching is essentially a romanticised memoir; Warm Pink is nothing like that. It is far deeper and more introspective and writing it, along with the later Why Men Made God, was what shaped my current world view.
My ideas about gender in particular were formed by the research and writing of Warm Pink. Although it is a breathlessly-paced romantic adventure, it required me to dig deep into the natures of gender and sexuality, something I had never done before.
I spent hours that amounted to weeks on forums where the subject of transgender was discussed and even invented a doppelgänger, MacShreach, to do this. (MacShreach, by the way, just means ‘Son of Shrek,’ which I thought rather fitted the character.)
But I did a great deal of conventional research too. There were precious few books and papers available but I read them all. I think the most useful was Don Kulick’s Travesti, which is a must-read, partly for the insight it gives and partly just because it’s a great book.
I learned Spanish (thanks to the lovely Fabi Pinilla, my longsuffering teacher, who became a real and lasting friend) and enough Portuguese to read interviews in those languages. This was because at the time, there were practically no such resources featuring young transgender women in English. But there were and remain, many published in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Colombia and elsewhere in South America, as well as in Spain itself, where there is a long history of transgender cultural integration. The artists Picasso and Dali associated with transgender women, as did the film-makers Luis Bunuel and Pedro Almodovar.
Bruna Geneve
There is a dichotomy between the culture in these Latin countries and that in North America and the UK. In the former, nearly all the trans women appeared to have transitioned young, often at or before puberty. They typically began taking feminising hormones around the age of 12 or 13. This information fed directly into the construction of Rafy, Warm Pink’s female lead; she tells a story typical of Brazilian trans women.
However, in the Anglo-Saxon world, the majority — by far — of trans women then transitioned over the age of forty. This misled a number of American psychologists into thinking that there were actually two types of trans women, and ultimately to Ray Blanchard’s bizarre and now discredited typology.
We now know that Blanchard was wrong, and that the cause of the anomaly in the Anglo-Saxon world was the extreme, violent and pernicious repression against young trans people. This was a time, only ten years ago, when ‘reparative’ therapies, now totally discredited for use against gay men, were being strongly advocated for use against young trans women, in order to turn them into gay men.
This is a level of misogyny that can only be wondered at: it was literally saying that any future, for someone born with a penis and testicles, was preferable to being a woman. At the same time, women who escaped their clutches were beaten, discriminated against and murdered.
I was horrified by this, and by the smug, academic self assurance with which these monsters — I can think of no other word — perpetrated their tortures, akin to water-boarding, on completely defenceless young people. It both made me angry on behalf of their victims and further hostile to the cosy, self-congratulatory club of academia, where such vile ideas are given platform.
The consequence of the repression they suffered was that trans women were bottling up their true natures, often for decades; this is why they presented late. We have just seen, in Caitlyn Jenner, a classic example of this. As repression is reduced we should see many more girls transitioning young and the demographic should align with that which is seen elsewhere.
But in 2005 and 2006, when I was writing Warm Pink, none of the recent developments had yet happened. Blanchard’s typology still had traction, even though a reaction had already begun against it, led by transwomen who were rightly offended to their cores by its gross misrepresentations of them. Perhaps the single most powerful catalyst had been the publication of Michael Bailey’s egregious work of populist pseudo-science, The Man Who Would Be Queen in 2003. Trans women were being erased by society, by health professionals and in the media. In some ways Warm Pink was my reaction against Blanchard and Bailey’s attempt to erase the identity of an oppressed group altogether.
Karol Bonkar
The book was an attempt to publicise the fact that not only do young trans women exist, they have established, valid, lived histories which are consistent throughout the world. They know they are trans from before puberty. Their gender dysphoria is such that they simply cannot live as boys. They are almost exclusively attracted to men, and generally prefer the submissive role in sex, though there are notable exceptions.
I explored these alternative sexualities through AnnaMaria’s relationship to Rafy — there was never any doubt in my mind that this was a case of unrequited desire — and Rafy’s with her prior mentor, Marina.
Perhaps the mos fascinating thing I discovered in researching the book was the extensive support network that exists for young trans women. Brazil is a conundrum: the culture is viciously macho and repressive, yet there are huge numbers of trans women. Murder rates against them are the highest reported in the world, yet Brazilian transgender beauty is iconic and has been celebrated for decades; witness Roberta Close.
Roberta Close
I struggled at first to see how this could be, but it seems that the support network is the key. Young trans girls are adopted by older trans women and then educated — in being transgender– and supported though their journey of transition, which they fund — certainly in Brazil — almost exclusively by sex work.
(I just read Janet Mock’s excellent Redefining Realness in which she describes a very similar support network and how she, too, funded her transition through sex work. I think it shows great courage and integrity that she should be so open about this and I highly recommend her book.)
This support network allows young transwomen to survive in these repressive cultures, which I was able to confirm when I began to visit the Philippines. Here, there is severe prejudice and discrimination against trans people because of the generally malignant influence of Christianity, yet trans women are everywhere. This is explained at night, when you discover an entire subculture that sustains them.
So Warm Pink is about the nature of young transgender, something that was then being largely ignored both by patriarchal academics like Blanchard and his followers Bailey and Zucker, and the hegemony of late-transitioning women who had adopted a privileged position. Young trans women’s narratives and lived histories were being suppressed and I wanted to redress that.
At the same time, of course, the book is an exploration of my own relationship to trans women, as a man.
Through Brian, the book’s male lead, I explored the nature of the relationship between a trans woman and a straight man who loves her. I put him in a position he could never have believed he would be in, and let him find his fate. There was no predetermined narrative and the end was by no means a foregone conclusion. It was just the way it worked out.
I gave Brian a real test, to find out what he was made of; and in the end, I think he came through with flying colours.
However, Brian and Rafy’s relationship reveals something else: trans women feel affirmed by their relationships with men. This is part of the attraction that not only sex work, but also cabaret dancing, modelling, beauty pageants and a range of other activities have for them.
This offends some radical feminists who have reacted in a fashion that shows the profound intolerance of their philosophy. The vicious damage that they do, deliberately, out of spite against the most discriminated-against group in society, is both a scandal and pure hypocrisy. People like Julie Bindell, Catherine Brennan and their fellow travellers have no right to claim they support ‘human rights’ when they seek to deny them to others, to eradicate those others and erase their very identity. Happily these are a minority even amongst feminists.
I had always supported the equality of women, but I had never really felt the bitter sense of oppression that many women experience, until I saw it through trans women’s eyes. Nobody would ever choose to be trans; it leads, for most, to a life of poverty, discrimination, violence and often murder.
Through the extreme hostility of the patriarchy, for which radical feminists are but agents, towards trans women, I realised the oppression of the patriarchy against all women. It made me a feminist, if I am one. (Something I leave to others to judge.)
Writing The Warm Pink Jelly Express Train was a voyage of discovery for me, and I tried very hard to be true to that. The new edition, which contains many revisions, reflects discoveries I have made since it was first published, but no substantive areas have been changed.
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