Boys Like Her: Transfictions

Ian C. Nelson is assistant director of libraries at the University of
Saskatchewan, and président de la Troupe du Jour, Regina Summer Stage.

Boys Like Her is guaranteed to keep the reader constantly off balance.
The material was originally written for performance and has been
transformed into narrative fiction. Although each piece in the anthology
is clearly ascribed to one or more individuals of the performance
collective Taste This, one is forced constantly to wonder who is
actually speaking (and from what gender perspective) and to ask if the
piece itself is background, personal anecdote, or confabulation for the
stage. In the introduction, the four contributors say: “These stories
are true, except the ones we made up... they are written by four women,
except when we’re not.”

The subtitle “Transfictions” is apt, for “genre, gender and
generations are malleable.” A transgendered person of about 50 has
written the foreword to this book, ecstatic that here at last are
stories “about what you were once forbidden to speak.” In the end,
perhaps attitude is what it is all about: “Whether I am read as a
gigolo, a pre-pubescent lad, a man-hating dyke or a lesbian, something
is better than nothing.” Only a few texts and images in this
well-designed book are so extreme that the general reader might wish
“he’d stayed at the shallow end of the gender pool.”