Here is a short contribution on why a work of fiction is so important to social and political discussions, and specifically how my novel Hanna’s Ascent can stir action where a non-fiction book may fail.
In the course of the ~200,000 revisions to my debut novel (the total number of “track changes” entries) I took an online course led by a famous literary agent who need not be named. At one point I was asked for a brief description of the essential crisis or conflict of the protagonist, which I said was how to successfully pass as a woman despite being six feet two inches tall, while living in a time and place (1950s rural Colorado) where not passing gave many observers a dilemma: do I just off the dude directly or have a little fun first? The agent’s response: “Hey, in the 1970s Renée Richards did it!”
A novel can teach us why that is breathtakingly ignorant, but it can do much more.
Some of us thought we had left those dark times behind, that nationwide legal protection was just around the corner, and that the body- and mind-scarring experience of a false puberty would no longer be imposed on trans children. Such touching naïveté. Though we have transgender state legislators, superior court judges, and many other successes, revealing that identity to the world in some places once again risks not only social ostracism but the end of one’s life.
But this has been written about in countless memoirs and expository books, one may object: how can a novel help? After all, it’s all invented. Don’t we need facts, scientific data, at least a stockpile of personal stories?