It’s a collection of short stories about the lives of trans women, which won a Lamda Award for best transgender fiction in 2014. Her remarkable debut, A Safe Girl to Love, was published by the now-defunct Topside Press. Plett’s career has long been about creating worlds filled with details-large and small-for trans women to exist in. This book came out in 1969, you know, very much of the zeitgeist of the time, or at least from my understanding, but I didn’t really need to because it was so specific. And I had no reference for almost anything that he was referencing. When I was 13, I read Portnoy’s Complaint,” Plett tells me, “which is all about the life of an American Jewish man growing up in New York City in the middle of the 20th century. Small details make the worlds in Plett’s stories feel both wildly unique and immediately accessible, a tendency she picked up at a young age. Blink and you might miss a passing reference to an old SAAN store, a now-defunct chain of Canadian department stores that sprang up in Manitoba before proliferating out to small towns nationwide. Plett’s stories place her characters on unique paths, drawn over maps of cities well lived in. One step over the line and you run the risk of universalizing the trans narrative, reducing trans women to simple platitudes. It’s a delicate line to walk, telling trans stories.
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