Jackie Kay's Trumpet : Transnational and Transracial

Adoption, Transgender Identity, and Fictions of

Transformation

Margaret Homans

Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, Volume 39, Number 1, Spring 2020,

pp. 123-150 (Article)

Published by The University of Tulsa

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/tsw.2020.0004

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/757245

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 Jackie Kay’s Trumpet:
Transnational and Transracial Adoption,
Transgender Identity, and Fictions of Transformation
Margaret Homans
Yale University

ABSTRACT: This essay addresses the harms produced by essentialisms of race and
gender by probing the insights of Jackie Kay’s 1998 Trumpet, a novel centered on a
character—the biracial adopted son of a trans man and the grandson of a transracial and
transnational adoptee—who is anguished by uncertainty about both his familial and racial
origins and his father’s and his own gender. Before turning to the novel, the essay discusses
the suffering that race and gender essentialisms can inflict on adoptees and positions the
problems of transracial and transnational adoption in relation to queer, transgender, and
diasporic thought. In solving her imagined character’s problems, Kay demonstrates the
transformative power of combining the hard-won lessons of these intersecting experiences
of border-crossing. The solution Kay imagines is realized in an exemplary way in the
self-writing of a transracial/transnational, transgender adoptee writing in the decade after
Trumpet’s publication.

At times of profound social change, fiction has often done the work of
embodying the future before it arrives as social reality.1 Such is the case
for Jackie Kay’s 1998 novel Trumpet. By offering an imaginary, even uto-
pian solution to an invented character’s troubles, Trumpet demonstrates at
once how anti-essentialist understandings of race and gender can relieve
the harms of transracial and transnational adoption and what adoption
stories can contribute to advancing intersectional gender and race theory.
Transnational and transracial adoption, queer and transgender becoming,
and diasporic migration can collaborate as promptings to imagine expan-
sive human futures. All involve boundary crossings and nonlinear journeys,
and all invite questions about the value normatively assigned to origins,
birth, and reproductive lineage and to the identities and institutions they
underwrite. When adopted and transgender identities collide in the nar-
rative of Trumpet, each activates the critical and creative potential of the
other. Because gender and racial essentialisms and heteronormativity cre-
ate widespread public harms, this essay is concerned not only with the real
and imaginary adoptees whose problems it closely considers but also with
what the situation of adoptees reveals about raced and gendered life at the
turn of the twenty-first century.
Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, Vol. 39, No. 1 (Spring 2020), pp. 123-150. © University of Tulsa, 2020.
All rights to reproduction in any form are reserved.
 Transracial and Transnational Adoption at the Intersection of Queer,
Transgender, and Migration Theory
Adoption has the potential to redefine not only cultural, ethnic, and
racial identity but also the human itself.2 Adoption can adhere rigidly to
nuclear or “as-if” biological family norms, contributing to the realization
of sexist and racist projects, but it can also enable non-normative family
forms, queer the family, and create new ways to be human.3 Yet consider
this haunting statement by Paul, an especially unhappy adoptee in Sheila
Ganz’s documentary film Unlocking the Heart of Adoption (2003):
The sense of being in time, the sense of being part of the human race, the
sense of being part of a continuum that started with Adam and Eve and is
going to go on till kingdom come: I don’t feel that at all; I feel completely
severed from any sense of roots; I feel completely uprooted; I feel like I’m
living in this strange separated slice of time. I’m having a hard time joining
up my history and what came before, the family before, and having a sense of
moving beyond today into the future.4
Chosen by his parents for his biraciality that would look “natural” in their
family with one white and one Asian parent, Paul says this racial configu-
ration just “perpetuate[d] the pretense” of their really being a family.5 His
dismay about not connecting to Adam and Eve through “the family before”
is exacerbated by his lack of a single, visually identifiable racial origin.
Because he feels “severed,” “separated,” and “uprooted” from the Judeo-
Christian time line—the linear historical narrative of sequence, causality,
and progress premised on the heterosexual and racially stratified biological
reproduction of the human species—Paul says he is not “a viable human
being.”6 In a voiceover, the filmmaker says that Paul took his own life in
1996.
What caused this terrible harm—Paul’s social death followed by his
physical death—and what could prevent its recurrence? Within currently
dominant adoption discourse, being human is intimately tied to biogenetic
family,7 and the normative goal of transcultural adoptees is—since the
failure of the forced assimilation model of adoption—to develop a “healthy
racial identity” derived from genetic ancestry.8 Paul’s heartbreaking state-
ment indicates how high the cost of such essentialisms can be.9 An old but
continuously reiterated orthodoxy holds that adoptees suffer from “genea-
logical bewilderment,” or the pain and confusion that arise from being
raised outside of “their natural clan.”10 Longing for biogenetic connection
has become so normative among transnational adoptees “that adoptees
who may not want to find their roots or who are not involved in a search of
origins are often viewed as being repressed or in denial.”11 But “genealogi-
cal bewilderment” such as Paul’s depends on the error of “conflat[ing] bio-
logical processes of reproduction with historical continuities.”12 Adoption

124 TSWL, 39.1, Spring 2020

reveals how arbitrarily racial or biogenetic features are assigned, how often
the effects of acculturation are confused with the essence of race or bio-
genetic heritage. To be understood as having lost something, an original
inheritance capable of bestowing identity must be presumed attached to
humans from birth.13 But culture cannot be biogenetic or inborn.
Not “origin deprivation,” then, but pervasive racism, genetic essential-
ism, and the ostracism of those whose identities do not align with their birth
are more likely sources of grief such as Paul’s.14 The pain is real enough, not
because of any biological need to know and to reproduce racial lines but
because racial essentialism and heteronormativity create the illusion that
such a need exists and governs human lives.15 While the film frames Paul’s
pain as an indictment of the closed records adoption system, his suffering
manifests in an extreme form the wider public problems of heteronorma-
tivity and the bioessentialist, racializing ideology of family and history that
propelled him on his futile search. The terrible and needless suffering of
adoptees such as Paul is an urgent prompting to think critically about the
widespread social harms of the essentialisms from which he suffered.
Their lives falling outside these powerful social norms, transcultural
adoptees who are positioned between birth and adoptive nations and
races and whose identities are, as a result, multiracial or hybrid could be
understood to call these norms into question, whether or not they do
so deliberately or even willingly.16 Questioning these norms would align
adoptees with decades of critiques from feminist, queer, transgender, and
diasporic points of view, critiques that converge to affirm the value of fail-
ing or refusing to reproduce familial and racial lines. Sara Ahmed articu-
lates such a convergence when, identifying with the “threat of queer . . .
to discontinue the father’s line,” she describes racial and national mixing as
“a queer genealogy”; not fitting into one racial or national category casts
doubt on all identity categories, including those of sex and gender.17 More
recently, transgender theory has, like queer theory, intersected productively
with thinking about diasporas and migration through the shared “trans-” in
transgender and transnational, as gender transition/affirmation is decreas-
ingly represented as a one-way “journey.”18 New insights become possible
through intersections between discourses and between critical points of
view. Although these intersections can be diagrammed schematically as a
matter of theory and, in the next few paragraphs, I will start to map the
alignment of a critical adoption perspective with intersectional queer,
transgender, and diasporic theory, my project in this essay is to show how
such convergences are literally and—of necessity in a work of fiction—
unevenly plotted into Kay’s novel. These convergences characterize both
the narrative and the conceptual work of Trumpet.
Intersectional queer and transgender critiques have begun explicitly
to address the exclusionary category of “the human,” understood to be

125
produced by raced and gendered norms. When transcultural adoptees find
themselves alienated from the norms materialized in “the father’s line,”
their distance could constitute such an intersectional critique of “the
human.” If “the human” as a category excludes those who do not conform
and if an adoptee’s (dis-/mis-)placement renders them, in Paul’s phrasing,
not “a viable human being” by severing them from species origins (from
“Adam and Eve . . . till kingdom come”), this dehumanization could
become, instead of a tragedy, a welcome escape from, as well as critique of,
the violence perpetrated by “the human.” Under the rubric of queer inhu-
manisms, transgender theorist Susan Stryker calls for continued efforts “to
abolish what ‘human’ historically has meant, and to begin to make it mean
otherwise.”19 Stryker’s “unnatural body,” defined as “a shape other than
that in which it was born,” could be an apt depiction of the adoptee, since
adoption laws, social practices, and discourses have material consequences
in creating an adoptee’s personhood and body.20 Adoption may arise from
dehumanizing legal and social practices and may be experienced as painful
and even traumatic, yet with its “queer genealogy,” it also offers other pos-
sible definitions of the human.
Along with queer, transgender, and diasporic ungroundings of family
and identity, adoption counters the premise that families exist to repro-
duce parental—or anyone’s—genetic heritage. Like transgender existence,
it interrupts the assumption that individuals are who they are from birth.
That adoption has been legitimized as a family form, writes Mark Jerng,
“displaces the centrality of birth for our understandings of who we are in
ways that we have yet to fully understand.”21 In some instances, adoption
has prompted the creation of new definitions of identity and the body.
Jeanette Winterson writes, “Adopted children are self-invented because
we have to be.”22 The Korean adoptees interviewed by Kim Park Nelson
tend to identify as “in-between,” “hybridized,” and even “transitioning” as
they move back and forth across “a White/Asian American color line.”23 In
a globalized world, transnational adoption, like gender transition/affirma-
tion and diasporic migration, is no longer a “one-way migration.”24 John
McLeod has coined the term “adoptive being” to name the “transfigurative
possibilities” produced by adoptees’ “multidirectional lines of attachment”
to both biogenetic and adoptive kin.25 Adoption places the adoptee in the
position of questioning and multiplying identity, not singularly establish-
ing it.
A few adoption scholars have explicitly argued for the queerness of
adoption.26 SooJin Pate, for example, in arguing that adoption inherently
“queers conventional structures of family,” observes transnational adop-
tion’s “potential to create radical new forms of kinship that eschews [sic] the
biological imperative of family making” by including the “completely non-
normative bodies [of] the Korean birth mother and the Korean adoptee.”27

126 TSWL, 39.1, Spring 2020

However, those who celebrate the queer potential of adoption tend to focus
even more on the social injustices of transnational adoption, which range
from the exploitation of the global south by the global north to the racisms
encountered in white adoptive families and communities.28 Although for
Ahmed, that “the queer child fails to inherit the family by reproducing its
line” is a queer badge of pride, many adoptees suffer from failing to live up
to biocentric, racialized family norms.29 For Paul, overwhelmed by his need
to connect with his birth parents and by his lack of a clear racial identity,
straying from Adam and Eve’s “continuum” feels like exile of the most terri-
ble kind, not “an opportunity to reconstruct what it means to be human.”30
To take Paul’s pain seriously means asking, with Jinthana Haritaworn,
“for whom might identifying with the nonhuman be too risky a move?”31
Critical adoption theory may refute the hegemony of the biogenetic fam-
ily and the paradigmatic personhood it produces, but these violations of
norms, for those who embody them, are seldom felt to be emancipatory.
Queer, transgender, and diasporic theory can help make it evident that
heteronormativity, bioessentialism, and racism, not the lack of access to
birth records, plague Paul and adoptees who feel like him, but these bodies
of theory offer no simple cure for grief such as his. Because transcultural
adoptees are more likely to suffer from the social and cultural power of bio-
centric ideals than to flourish without them, it is difficult to think “queer,”
“transgender,” and “diasporic” together with “adoption.” Yet this concep-
tual step would make adoption’s emancipatory potential to “reconstruct
what it means to be human” available to those who could benefit from it.
Adoption can be a source of skepticism about exclusionary national, racial,
and cultural identities and can provide platforms for imagining and theoriz-
ing the human in new ways, just as contemporary queer, transgender, and
diaspora theory can, but as Trumpet demonstrates, adoption is most likely to
reach this potential intersectionally, in collaboration with the other kinds
of ungrounding discussed here.

Jackie Kay’s Trumpet: A Queer, Adoptive, Invented Genealogy

Through the imagined yet plausible world of Trumpet, an author who is
herself queer and transculturally adopted speculates about this consequen-
tial intersection. Kay’s adopted, biracial hero Colman Moody is, like Paul,
burdened by rigidly essentializing assumptions about racial and national
origins and about binary gender; when both sets of normative assump-
tions become painfully ungrounded in the course of the narrative, the
convergence of multiple uncertainties eventually repairs the harm initially
occasioned by such rigid views. The novel takes seriously adoptees’ grief
and feelings of being severed from the human race even as it imagines lives
flourishing where adoption’s new “understandings of who we are” intersect

127
with a queer and transgender “remaking [of] what human has meant and
might yet come to be.”32 In the novel, these intersections play out across
time in an optimistic yet lifelike way—that is, not schematically but as
messy collisions and with ample acceptance of suffering, contingencies,
contradictions, anger, and love. In this fictive world, the convergence of
a transgender character’s history with histories of transnational and tran-
sracial adoption—at first painfully dehumanizing, then productive—makes
possible recognition, acceptance, and the promise of a reconfigured human
future.
Adopted as an infant by a working-class white couple in Scotland, Jackie
Kay was born to a white Scottish mother and a Nigerian father. Her adop-
tive parents were both deeply traditional—devoted to Scotland’s history,
cultural traditions, and landscape—and highly unconventional: members
of the international Communist Party who traveled regularly to the Soviet
Union, they defied convention by adopting two biracial children. Kay,
the poet laureate of Scotland, is out as a lesbian and publicly visible as a
transracial adoptee. Her 1991 poem cycle The Adoption Papers, originally
a radio play for three voices, is one of the best-known works of literature
about adoption in English. Her adoption memoir, Red Dust Road, about her
searches for and her ambivalent relationships with her Nigerian and Scots
birth families, appeared in 2010. In it she writes, with tempered optimism
about adoption’s possibilities, “the less you are given the more you can
make up.”33
Most critics of Trumpet read it as a novel either about transgender iden-
tity or (less often) about African diaspora; if the adoption theme is noticed
at all, it is as an aspect of the latter. Set in the late 1980s, it centers on the
recent death of Colman’s father, Joss Moody, a celebrated black Scottish
trumpet player. His gender transition/affirmation occurred long in the past
and was a secret to all but his wife Millie. The novel, opening immediately
after Joss’s death and the ensuing shocking revelation, is structured as a
series of narratives from different points of view, including those of Millie;
their biracial adopted son Colman; the tabloid journalist Sophie Stones,
who hopes to profit by the sensational story; various friends and acquain-
tances; the mother who knew Joss only as a girl; and three strangers whose
official roles (doctor, undertaker, registrar of deaths) enable Kay to contrast
state regulation of binary gender with the mutability and ambiguity of gen-
der’s lived experience. Although the action moves forward several months
from Joss’s death, its revelations about the past move further and further
back in time.
Most characters in the novel express the binarizing assumption that Joss
was a woman disguised as a man. Sophie calls him a “butch fraud,” a “trans-
vestite,” and a “perv” and insists on referring to him as “she.”34 Joss’s son
Colman, angry about feeling deceived, accuses his father of having been

128 TSWL, 39.1, Spring 2020

“a fucking lesbian,” an epithet that conveys both his gender-normative
assumptions and his anxious, self-defensive homophobia (p. 66).35 Readers
of the novel sometimes fall into the trap of echoing these obviously
ironized positions.36 Critics have been misled by overreading the parallels
between Joss and the historical Billy Tipton, described in Diane Wood
Middlebrook’s biography as a woman who cross-dressed in order to play jazz
trumpet.37 The novel also points to the equally binarizing error of defin-
ing Joss as “two completely different people—a woman and a man,” the
response of both the registrar (because Joss’s various documents assign him
to different genders) and initially of Colman (p. 79). Such mistakes are not
surprising; in the 1980s when the novel is set, as in the 1990s when it was
composed and published, the possibility that an individual born in a body
legible as female could be or become a man (particularly without medical
intervention) was by no means self-evident.38 Normative, essentializing
understandings of gender misrepresent Joss, and they torment his son,
whose anger at what he sees as his father’s betrayal expresses his insecurity
about his own gender and sexuality.
Other readers accept Joss’s gender as given, following the lead of a
“Transvestites Anonymous Group” within the novel that publishes a let-
ter in the newspaper: “We question this notion that somebody who lives
their life as a man and is discovered to be female at the time of death was
really a woman all along. What is ‘really’ in this context?” (pp. 159-60).39
Rather than supply a linear history or a rationale for Joss’s gender transi-
tion, the novel offers compelling images of the complex embodiment of
this “handsome tall man” (p. 238). When Millie recalls their first intimacy,
she remembers Joss “unwrapping endless rolls of bandage” to reveal his hid-
den breasts; once they are married, she routinely helps him dress, wrapping
the bandages “round and round, tight” without “thinking much” about
it (pp. 21, 238). Apart from this daily wrapping, his breasts “didn’t exist.
Not really” (p. 240). After Joss’s death the bandages seem part of his body.
Millie confesses that she keeps them in her underwear drawer, where “they
lie . . . curled and sleeping like a small harmless animal. They smell of him
still” (p. 239). She connects the bandages metonymically to Joss’s trumpet,
another animate extension of Joss’s male body. Joss’s gender transition
depends on his literally incorporating these objects into his transmaterial
subjectivity.
Joss’s transition is no “one-way migration.” Joss retains traces of his girl
self, psychically if not socially. In a chapter titled “Music,” written from
Joss’s posthumous point of view, his powerful trumpet playing not only
brings him back from the dead but also makes him “[lose] his sex”:
It is all in the blood. Cooking. Back, from way. When he was something else.
Somebody else. Her. That girl. The trumpet screams. He’s hot. She’s hot.
. . . He watches himself in flashback. He’s a small girl skipping along an old

129
 disused railway line in a red dress, carrying a bunch of railway flowers for her
mother. (pp. 131-32)
As the music takes over, he sees his entire life in one rapid sequence,
“transforming. Running changes. The body changes shape. From girl to
young woman to young man to old man to old woman” (p. 133). Music ren-
ders all phases of identity simultaneous, leaving nothing behind. Replacing
Joss’s physical “blood,” music unbinds both social and biological distinc-
tions of age and gender: “It is liberating. To be a girl. To be a man. / The
music is his blood. His cells” (p. 135).40 Although Joss is without doubt a
man, the novel imagines his transgender existence as transcending distinc-
tions between subject and object as well as between living and dead; the
girl remains inside the man.41
Only the reader is privy to this vision from inside Joss’s trans(cendent)
being, however. The mystery of his gender preoccupies the novel’s narra-
tors, and the driver of the plot is the troubled Colman, overwhelmed by his
discovery at the funeral parlor of “my father in a woman’s body” (p. 63).
“Conned” by his father, whose fame and talent always made Colman feel
inferior, he fears he now looks even more “thick,” and he angrily rejects
his mother for conspiring to conceal his father’s secret (p. 46). Instead, he
pursues answers to the proliferating questions that “obsess” him, such as
“how did they pull it off?” and “why he didn’t tell me”; Colman wants to
“find out about his father’s real life” (pp. 49, 54, 190). In search of what
he terms the truth, he breaks into the family home and discovers a letter
from his father marked, “To be opened after my death” (p. 65). Colman
assumes it will be “a list of excuses and reasons” for Joss’s secrecy; he
expects to learn the cause of Joss’s transition or to read a history of his life
in two genders (p. 65). Colman puts off opening the letter until the end of
the novel, which thus builds suspensefully toward the letter’s revelations.
But as we will see, the letter contains information of an entirely different,
unexpected kind.
Rather than directly address Colman’s need to stabilize his father’s
gender, the narrative moves sideways to substitute the seemingly acciden-
tally juxtaposed question of adoption. Joss’s letter shares space in an “old
leather bag” with “the adoption stuff about myself,” papers that Colman
now removes along with his father’s letter (p. 65). Although few critics
note the connection, Colman’s adoption repeatedly intersects with and
becomes interchangeable with the subject of gender transition. (The rela-
tion between these two topics is initially metonymic but becomes analo-
gous.) Planning to raid the leather bag for information about Joss’s gender,
Colman comments, “I’ve never been a nosey bastard in my life. [But] I’ve
got a right now. It’s my life,” the very claim that typically launches adop-
tees’ birth parent searches and that Kay conspicuously transposes from one
domain into the other (pp. 51-52).42 Because he is biracial, Colman as a

130 TSWL, 39.1, Spring 2020

baby in 1962, like Kay herself, would have been hard to place; the agency
called his parents “a find” (p. 50). Like Paul in Ganz’s film, Colman is
anxiously aware that appearing to be his parents’ biological son is only an
artifice produced by his adoption placement.
Although he knows he was named William Dunsmore at birth, Colman
claims (in the same defensive tone in which he asserts that he is straight
and masculine) not to “give a toss about my real parents” or to feel curi-
ous “which one was black or where the black one came from” (pp. 57,
58). His defensiveness makes it clear he indeed “give[s] a toss” about his
racial origins as well as about his father’s gender. Although the topics of
transracial adoption and his father’s transmasculine identity would seem to
occupy distinct domains, when he has to re-see his entire history through
the revelation about his father’s gender, his phrasing—“the life, the one I
thought I knew I’d lived, changed. Now I don’t know what I lived. . . . I
haven’t got the same life”—precisely anticipates his remarks, a few pages
later, about the different selves of adoption: “I’d have been a completely
different man. Definitely. I mean a William Dunsmore’s smile would be dif-
ferent from a Colman Moody’s smile,” a smile he knows is a “carbon copy”
of Joss’s (pp. 46, 56, 50).43 Colman equates the destabilizing effects of his
adoption with those of his father’s gender.
That Colman sees his life divided into two lives not once but twice, first
by adoption and then by the revelation about his father’s gender, makes
him uncannily and ironically like his many-lived father (“girl to young
woman to young man to old man to old woman”). In childhood, Colman
recalls his father telling him his birth origins did not matter. Now, Colman
conflates the mysteries of adoption and gender transition, complaining
that both sets of parents only “cause pain” and “mess with your head” and
worrying in the same rapid train of thought that what he sees as the unre-
ality of Joss’s gender “has made us all unreal” (p. 60). “He has made us all
unreal” in context refers to Joss’s gender, but Colman here echoes adoptee
rights advocate Betty Jean Lifton’s claim that adoptees’ lives are “unreal”
and “fictitious.”44 Colman again conflates adoption and gender transition
when he notes that his plan to visit Joss’s hometown to learn the truth of
his gender is like an adoptee’s search: “Funny, I always thought one day I
might get round to tracing my other father. Ironic, isn’t it?” (p. 121). In
Sophie’s scheming, the search for Joss’s sensational story is an origins search
that mimics a birth parent search; her great discovery is that Joss’s mother,
Edith Moore, is alive and still living in Scotland.
At the same time that the novel makes adoption interchangeable with
gender transition as events that render persons “unreal,” it also intertwines
both with migration, as processes that all involve uncertainty about or
alteration of origins and identity. Joss’s mother—to whom he sent money
and letters signed “Josephine” every week for thirty years, unbeknownst to

131
Millie or anyone else—recalls “Josephine,” during Joss’s final, perplexing
visit decades earlier, as at once masculine and foreign: “The night that
Josephine brought the carry-out chicken curry she was wearing a man’s
suit. Edith still asks herself about this. Why bring her a curry in a man’s
suit? Why bring her a curry when she doesn’t like foreign food?” (p. 219).
The “foreign” curry signifies strangeness and metonymically suggests the
foreignness of Josephine’s unexpected gender presentation. Although Edith
does not allow herself to know it, she has correctly perceived that her
child is transitioning. Here, Kay has Joss anticipate a formulation such as
Ahmed’s when she calls a “mixed genealogy” a “rather queer way of begin-
ning” since destabilized racial or national identity can coincide with the
destabilization of sex and gender identity.45 The superimposition of a rec-
ognizable cultural foreignness (“foreign food”) onto the unnamable gender
alteration that Edith resists reading (her daughter in a man’s suit) allows
Edith at once to recognize and overlook the changes occurring in her
beloved child. This superimposition also invites the reader to see migration
and gender transition as figures for one another.
Similarly, Colman compares his childhood as a migrant, when the family
moved from Glasgow to London, to his father’s gender transition. Colman
recalls, “When we moved down to London I still called an ice-cream a
pokey hat when I was with my parents and called it an ice-cream with my
mates” (p. 53). He calls this code-switching “schizophrenic,” but in the
next moment, he reflects: “I wasn’t nearly as schizophrenic as [my father].
Doing what he did is in a different league from saying mocket to one person
and dirty to another” (p. 53). In the present, Colman “doesn’t feel Scottish.
He doesn’t speak with a Scottish accent,” so while on the train going north
to Scotland to find Edith, he mingles his anxiety about “find[ing] out about
his father’s real life” with anxiety “about crossing a border” (p. 190). The
migrant’s return to his place of origin, structured like an adoptee’s return,
is equated with uncovering the putative truth of gender. Both of these
anxieties mingle with uncertainty about racial and national identity. His
lack of an authentic Scots accent means that when he fakes one, “it’s not
him. What is him? . . . Colman doesn’t feel as if he has a history,” just as
his father seems “unreal like a fantasy of himself,” a thought that mingles
Colman’s anxious projections about his father’s gender with Joss’s—and his
own—hazy relationship with the idea of Africa (pp. 190-91).
Africa, as a possible origin and ground of authentic identity, looms large
for both men, as they are both biracial, both living identities unlinked from
origins. Colman’s thoughts move from his father’s unreality and his own
lack of “a history” as an adoptee directly to his disparagement of “mates of
his that go on and on about Africa. It feels false to him” (p. 191). Much like
Colman’s mates, his father had delightedly substituted United States black
culture—“Martin Luther King, Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller”—for the

132 TSWL, 39.1, Spring 2020

personal history he had to deny by pretending both his parents were dead,
but Colman finds this lineage equally “unreal” (p. 192). Kay has Colman
anticipate Stuart Hall’s early 1990s exposure of the instability of diasporic
and migrant origins: “The original ‘Africa’ is no longer there.”46 Colman’s
rejection of his father’s adopted origins as “unreal” or “false” resonates with
his own uncertainties as an adoptee, which imply that he believes a true
origin lies somewhere, if only he could find it. Kay attributes to him the
lack of self-assurance that can haunt adoptees such as Paul who feel they
lack—yet need—connection to a verifiable birth history.
Joss tried, unsuccessfully, to teach Colman his philosophy of self-reliance
and self-creation in both domains of identity, raced and gendered: “Know
who you are and it doesn’t matter where your mother or father was from,
he said. Did he? Did he really say that? How could he when he didn’t fuck-
ing know if he was a man or a woman?” (p. 192). Implicitly, Joss builds on
his own experience of gender self-creation to encourage the adopted son
who knows nothing about his birth to invent himself, as indeed adoptive
parents frequently encourage their children to invent stories about their
unknown birth parents.47 As part of his own self-creation (and as if he
were a student of Hall’s), Joss invented an Africa; the subject and title of
his “first big hit” was “Fantasy Africa” (p. 34). “Fantasy Africa” is also the
title of the chapter in Red Dust Road in which Kay discusses in the most
positive terms her own pleasurable imaginings about her birth: “‘Maybe
your father was an African chief,’ my mother used to say, and, ‘Maybe you
are an African princess.’ I liked that.”48 Kay transposes adoptees’ invented
origins onto Joss’s invention of racial/ethnic roots for himself and his son.
Observing Colman’s recollections while Colman himself revisits them,
the reader understands that Joss was giving his son a lesson about gender
identity too.
The novel uses Joss’s creation of his own Africa to confirm his confident
self re-invention as a man. Trying to teach the practice of self-invention to
his adopted son, Joss explained that father and son were “related the way it
mattered,” just as Joss’s jazz band forms a family: “He said you make up your
own bloodline, Colman. Make it up and trace it back. Design your own
family tree—what’s the matter with you? Haven’t you got an imagination?”
(p. 58). Although Colman demands, to the contrary, to know “really”
where Joss’s father came from, Joss insists:
Look Colman, I could tell you a story about my father. I could say he came off
a boat one day in the nineteen hundreds, say a winter day. All the way from
the “dark continent” on a cold winter day, a boat that stopped at Greenock.
. . . He liked Greenock so he settled. Or I could say my father was a black
American. . . . Or I could say my father was from an island in the Caribbean
whose name I don’t know. . . . any of these stories might be true, Colman.
(pp. 58-59)

133
Joss thus refuses to differentiate the invented (“make it up and trace
it back”) from the unknown real (birth parents whom adoptees might
“trace”).49
Here Kay anticipates the “queer genealogy” propelled by refusals at once
of heteronormativity and of racial/ethnic purity. But by presenting these
concepts within a family narrative, Kay can dramatize the losses as well as
the gains, Colman’s irate protest as well as Joss’s serene confidence. When
Colman demands to know which origin story about his grandfather is true,
Joss insists, “You pick the one you like best and that one is true. It doesn’t
change me who my father was or where he came from and it certainly
doesn’t change you” (p. 59). Colman sees in retrospect that Joss is talk-
ing about gender without roots in an originating body (Stryker’s “shape
other than that in which it was born”), as well as the identity formation
of migrants compelled to reinvent themselves in new places. Joss wants
Colman to stop caring about origins; if Colman can accept a fictional
racial/ethnic origin, perhaps he will one day learn to unlink gender from
biological origins too. Joss’s radical insistence on the value of self-invented
origins and identity applies to the adoptee, the migrant, and the trans man
at once.
Colman resists, however, and two pages after recalling his father’s les-
son, he claims he is going to “trace him back to when he was a girl in
Greenock,” reversing his father’s phrasing (“make it up and trace it back”)
to reaffirm his belief not only in original biological gender but also in
ethnic/national origins (p. 61). His need to search is, in a way, vindicated
(and Kay herself successfully “traced”). When he reaches Greenock, the
narrative shows him arriving at the home of Edith (when, uncannily, she
recognizes him—a point to which we will return), then skips to Colman
leaving hours later with a package of old photos that he “strokes” and car-
ries “gently,” with a restored memory of his father’s long-ago bedtime song,
and with sorrow: “How could his father have stopped seeing her? What a
waste” (p. 242). Edith, the reader understands, must have accepted or even
embraced Colman’s account of her daughter’s transformation into a man.
Edith, after all, displays in her home a photograph of her very dark-skinned
late husband, Colman’s grandfather, a photograph that marks her own life
path as just as deviant with regard to racial norms as Joss’s was with regard
to gender.
The visit relieves Colman of his habitual cynicism and reconciles him to
his father’s transmasculinity: “Now that he’s seen the little girl, he can see
something feminine in his memory of his father’s face that must have been
there all along” (p. 241). Allowing himself to feel tenderness and sorrow,
Colman drops the defensive, rigidly masculine pose that has character-
ized his angry thoughts about his father and his interactions with Sophie.
Colman’s need to trace his father’s origin is vindicated, but what he finds is

134 TSWL, 39.1, Spring 2020

not a stable truth of original gender but a way to accept his father’s and his
own nonconformities. He stops worrying that his masculinity is inauthen-
tic because it was learned from a non-biological man, and he accepts their
shared (though not genetically linked) biraciality—their different ways of
being human.
Colman is at last “ready for” the posthumous letter he found in the
leather bag alongside his adoption papers (p. 270). Given the narrative’s
preoccupation with Joss’s gender, the reader is primed for a document
revealing, if not the long-awaited “truth” of “his father’s real life,” at least
some account of Joss’s experience of transition. But Joss frustrates these
expectations—necessarily, because there is no “truth” of his gender. The
letter instead addresses Colman’s long-ago yearning to know “which one is
true” of Joss’s fabulous origin stories about his father, John Moore. Although
Joss calls it “the story of any black man who came from Africa to Scotland,”
John did not arrive as a man but as a small, unparented child migrant, given
up at age six by his father, who “persuaded a Scottish captain of a ship to
take him back to Scotland and give him some kind of education” (pp. 271,
274). Landing in Greenock, disoriented by the cold, fog, and strangeness
of Scotland, the little boy is taken in by a wealthy white man; denied the
education he was sent away to acquire, he instead—no doubt because of his
skin color—becomes a servant.
This story resonates with many recent accounts of adoption across
national and racial lines, for example that of Jane Jeong Trenka, who
writes that her Korean mother saw her daughter’s adoption as “some kind of
extended study-abroad program” but that she encountered terrible racism
growing up in an all-white family and community.50 Adoption has an ugly
history of devolving into servitude, and today’s sharpest critics of transna-
tional adoption liken it to slavery.51 Thus John’s adoption story invokes a
long chronology of adoption abuses. On his first day in the Scottish fog,
he becomes fragmented: “[He] felt as if he too was disembodied. His own
body became broken up by the fog; his left arm missing” (p. 273). Missing
a limb or an organ is a common trope for how adoptees experience their
deracination.52 That initial sensation of radical self-discontinuity persists
as memory loss. The boy tries to but cannot recall “the hot dust on the red
road, the jacaranda tree, his mother’s hot breath on his cheek” (p. 273).
In mourning and uncertain of the coherence of his own body, John (“not
his original name”) has a transnational adoptee’s perception of the funda-
mental changeability of life: “Life, he told me [writes Joss in the letter], was
like a fork of lightning. He could see exactly where one decision violently
parted company with another and a new future flared up before him”
(pp. 276, 274).
Through the common thread of complete, life-altering change lead-
ing to a “new future,” Joss’s letter explicitly links the three generations,

135
the transnational and transracial adoptee, the trans man, and the biracial
adoptee: “That’s the thing with us: we keep changing names. We’ve all got
that in common. We’ve all changed names, you, me, my father. All for dif-
ferent reasons” (p. 276). Likewise, John Moore’s sense of dismemberment
and dislocation as a child in radically unfamiliar surroundings is echoed by
Joss and by Colman, although what John experiences as fearfully dehuman-
izing takes on positive meanings for Joss and Colman. The chapter “Music,”
which describes Joss’s simultaneous experience of all his selves at once—
“He is a girl. A man. Everything, nothing”—ends with music blowing him
apart—“He lets it rip. He tears himself apart. He explodes”—and then
“slowly, slowly, piecing himself together” (p. 136). Similarly Colman, hop-
ing to find photos of Josephine, fears that his father may have “cut himself
up or burnt himself to hide the evidence,” but Joss leaves to Colman his
secret archive of “letters, photographs, records, documents, certificates,”
emphasizing Colman’s freedom to reassemble his father’s life as he chooses
(pp. 60, 276). Joss’s loss of himself in music and his embrace of living on
as a collection of fragments celebrates the fragmentation that traumatizes
the child John.
Like his grandfather, Colman initially experiences self-fragmentation
traumatically in his state of crisis after seeing his father’s body in the
funeral home: “What would William Dunsmore do for a living . . . A doctor
who would specialize in—what? Plastic surgery? Sex changes? Hormones?
Christ. Where is this coming from. Is it coming from him? Is he spinning
out or what? His brain is mince” (pp. 138-39). But a later image of self-
fragmentation becomes as favorable for Colman as the tropes of fragmenta-
tion associated with Joss. After the visit to Edith, so emotionally taxing yet
so satisfying, “he needs to bury himself in sleep, to go down and down until
he is no longer conscious of himself, until he could be someone else dream-
ing of himself” (p. 242). Self-division—a condition perhaps as unavoidable
for the adoptee as for the trans man—becomes in the end a positive way to
figure the self. Anticipating the critiques of the human discussed earlier in
this essay, Kay shows how dehumanization can become “an opportunity to
reconstruct what it means to be human.”
That reconstruction of the human in Kay’s work takes an explicitly fic-
tional form. Joss’s letter presents the story of his father’s painful adoption
as the truth because Joss has “changed [his] mind” about claiming that a
made-up origin story will serve as well as the real one. Wishing to survive in
his son’s memory as his father has in his, he sees the passing on of a life story
as a way of preserving life: “I can see him, because he told me the story,
as clearly as if I was there” (p. 271). He ends the letter with the poignant
memory of his father singing him to sleep, just as Colman has recalled his
father’s bedtime song. Yet the story of an African boy arriving by ship was
only one of the options Joss offered Colman as a child, and to bear out

136 TSWL, 39.1, Spring 2020

the possible validity of other stories, the novel has one of Josephine’s old
school mates recall that her friend’s father was from the West Indies. Even
Edith’s perspective casts doubt on John’s story when she reflects that her
married life was “so far back that she could have made him up” (p. 220).
When John spoke of himself, Joss says, it was “like he was telling me a ghost
story” (p. 273). John loved to read, loved words in the way a poet does, and
became a painter (if only, owing to the limits of his class position, a house
painter).
Has Joss simply elaborated an already fabricated version of his father’s
story? Or did his father himself fabricate a set of origin stories and, like
Joss, invite his son to choose? After all, the memory of his father endures
“because he told me the story,” not because of any belief Joss may have in
its truth. The letter leaves an uncertainty that, like the shared experiences
of self-division and “changed names,” links the trans man, his adopted
father, and his adopted son. For those who have changed identities so radi-
cally, there are no meaningfully knowable origins. The three men share this
legacy of uncertain, even fictitious, self-created origins; associating that
legacy with the two older men’s artistry, Kay insists on its vital creativity.
With the letter’s sudden expansion of the novel’s timescale, an unan-
swerable question about gender identity is answered by a story—its truth
status unascertainable—about adoption. By offering John’s unverifiable
racial/national origin story as a substitute for the expected but untold origin
story of Joss’s gender, the novel suggests the interchangeability of all these
forms of unknowable origination (just as Edith earlier thought, “Why bring
her a curry in a man’s suit?”). Not only are origins uncertain here, the very
question of where an origin might be sought, in the “truth” of gender or
in the “truth” of race or nationality, is refused. Transcultural adoption and
transgender being converge to activate new ways of thinking about larger,
shared questions of origins and human freedom.
At the level of plot and character, this convergence allows Colman at
last to mourn his father by confirming his place in the family. The three
men form a family continuum—“Us . . . we . . . all”—“related the way it
mattered,” as Joss promised Colman as a child; it is not a biologically repro-
ductive line but, instead, a queer genealogy (pp. 276, 58). John fathered
Josephine not Joss, and neither is biologically related to Colman. The
family line premised on uncertain, possibly fictive origins is composed of
non-linear deviations (gendered and racial/national), and it more closely
resembles Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s queer “open mesh of possibilities” or
Ahmed’s “queer way of beginning” than it does “Adam and Eve [to] king-
dom come,” the myth deriving identity from raced and gendered origins
that torments Paul in Ganz’s film.53 Queering the story of family gives
the adopted Colman the family he needs, in which everyone’s story is as
non-normative as his and no one is excluded from the human. This queer
genealogy promises to aid his creation of a new identity. Kay makes Colman
137
the beneficiary of an imaginative project aligned with Stryker’s: “to abol-
ish what ‘human’ historically has meant, and to begin to make it mean
otherwise.”54 In Butler’s words, “the ‘human’ expand[s] to include [him].”55
The novel’s brief final chapter underscores these connections by empha-
sizing Colman’s uncanny physical resemblance to Joss. When Colman
arrives for his long-deferred visit to mourn with his mother, she watches
him approach and observes, “he moved so like his father” (p. 278). That
Millie sees Joss in her son is unsurprising since Colman learned masculine
style from him, but it echoes Edith’s earlier, more startling recognition of
the grandson she had never seen and to whom neither she, her dead hus-
band, nor their child Josephine is biologically related. When Edith first sees
this stranger approach her house, he is a “tall dark young man who looks
oddly familiar” (p. 227). This recognition lends heft to Colman’s report
early in the novel that “people that didn’t know I was adopted said things
like, ‘You’re your father’s spitting image, you are’” (p. 45). Has the force
of the family gaze or of Colman’s own yearning—“what I wanted when I
was a kid was to look like my father” (p. 45)—imprinted resemblance on
the child’s body so that even a stranger can see it? Adoptees sometimes
resemble their non-biologically related adoptive parents; Kay reports this
to be true of herself and her mother, and Colman knows his smile is his
father’s.56 His resemblance to his adoptive father and grandfather affirms
Colman’s place as an adoptee and as a biracial man whose masculinity
is non-standard (for Edith to recognize him, his resemblance must be to
Josephine) in the queer, deviating family line of men whose origins are not
singular, fully knowable, or identity-conferring. Like Joss’s and Stryker’s,
Colman’s body takes “a shape other than that in which it was born.”
In Trumpet, adoption not only queers the family but also transforms the
body, just as gender transition/affirmation can. While the body of the young
boy who will become John nearly disintegrates through his dehumanizing
experience of adoption, Joss creates his masculine body transmaterially
with music, bandages, and great style. Colman’s adopted body, likewise,
is created for and by him in imaginary relation to his parents. In equating
and intersecting these events of bodily de-creation and re-creation, adop-
tive and transgender, the novel underscores the powerful interaction of two
modes of being that challenge normative understandings of the human and
propose new possibilities. Colman acknowledges his love for his transmas-
culine father and accepts his adopted place in the multi-racial family, but
only because he can recognize the inclusive humanness promised by both
transformative agencies at the same time. These recognitions arise from
Colman’s acceptance of the “realness” of the fictional; both gender and
lineage are stories, but they are no less real for being so, just as works of
fiction such as Trumpet can give form to what does not yet exist as widely
accepted social reality.

138 TSWL, 39.1, Spring 2020

 Memoir, Theory, and the Work of Fiction
A few years after Ganz filmed her interview with Paul and Kay published
Trumpet (with, as I have been suggesting, its imaginary solution to Paul’s
real problems), what Kay imagined as fiction in her novel—the productive
intersection of gender transition/affirmation and transcultural adoption—
was realized in a brief memoir and a blog post by trans activist and adoptee
Pauline Park. Having struggled with a “lifelong identity complex” as a
“fake Korean” before she found that “there was no essence of Koreanness to
pursue,” Park says she discovered adoption’s emancipatory potential only
upon recognizing “‘transgender’ as [a] distinct form of gender identity” and
herself as a “male-bodied woman,” or in Stryker’s terms, as having a body
in “a shape other than that in which it was born.”57 Her discovery of “a
parallel between my identity as a transgendered woman and my identity
as a Korean adoptee” freed her from “a false discourse of authenticity” in
both domains:
Just as I came to realize that the sex/gender binary constructed an artificial
and ultimately false dichotomy between “man” and “woman” (heteronorma-
tively defined), I came to understand that I had a set of experiences and a life
history as a Korean adoptee that was distinct from that of Koreans or Korean
Americans just as it was different from European Americans, despite my hav-
ing grown up in a white household and in an all-white neighborhood.58
Far from expressing a wish to search for birth family or cultural origins, she
refuses the idea that her birth, as a Korean and as a boy, determines who she
can be. Insisting it is the “parallel” between her two “identity complexes”
that sparked her insights into both “false discourse[s] of authenticity,” Park
links her two discoveries with the phrase “just as,” implying both analogy
and simultaneity.59
As if anticipating Park’s double realization (I do not claim that Park was
literally influenced by Kay’s novel), Kay’s utopian resolution at the end of
Trumpet depends on Colman’s making his peace all at once with his fam-
ily’s histories of transcultural adoption and gender nonconformity. These
are histories he can inherit through the non-linear, queer genealogy the
novel traces, and they lead him to a resolution that shares Park’s “just as”
logic. “Just as” the visit with Edith and the viewing of her treasured pho-
tographs lets Colman finally accept “something feminine in his memory
of his father’s face” and therefore in his own gender and sexual definition,
he is ready to absorb the harrowing story of his grandfather’s adoption and
therefore to accept his own life as an adoptee, whose life (like that of his
grandfather) is like a “fork of lightning . . . where one decision violently
parted company with another and a new future flared up before him.” For
Colman as for Park, these twin realizations occur close together in time; he
reads the letter just hours after leaving Edith’s house, these events plotted
so that (as we have seen) the race-changing adoption story arrives as a sub-
139
stitute or equivalent for the gender history. Colman’s realizations are analo-
gous; as much for Colman as for Park, to borrow Park’s phrasing, both “false
discourse[s] of authenticity” give way to the understanding that “there was
no essence”—either of gender or of racial/national origin—“to pursue.”
Two decades after Kay’s novel and a decade after Park’s personal writings,
it is no longer surprising to find “reconstruct[ions] of what it means to be
human” in terms of gender identity represented in fiction and memoir and
in criticism and theory.60 Yet academic recognition of the intersectionality
of transgender reconstructions of the human has lagged behind, as the edi-
tors of “The Issue of Blackness,” a special issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies
Quarterly, noted in 2017, arguing that the black transgender subject has
generally been exploited as a “springboard to move toward other things,
presumably white things.”61 The editors of “The Issue of Blackness” call for
more visibility given to black feminist theory as well as theory produced
by black trans women. Barbara Christian, in one of the founding gestures
of black feminist criticism decades ago, claimed that black novelists have
been doing theory all along, just not in academic language.62 By this
logic, Kay’s novel invents and practices intersectional transgender adop-
tion theory, using the convergence of a transgender history with stories
of transnational and transracial adoption as a catalyst “to abolish what
‘human’ historically has meant, and to begin to make it mean otherwise.”
When the ungrounding of racial origins in the adoption stories intersects
with the ungrounding of binary gender in Joss’s history, each destabilization
confirms and validates the other, and this is not only a narrative but also
a portable idea.
If Trumpet is work of theory—offering a way of thinking about the situ-
ations it represents and not just a unique and ungeneralizable story—how
far, and to whom, might this model extend? Are Joss, John, and Colman
everymen, their ambiguous and shifting identities paradigmatic of human
identity itself, as it should be or even as it (truly but not yet recogniz-
ably) already is? Paul in the film is traumatized by both racial and gender
essentialisms, but he does not share the fictional characters’ racial/national
configuration (black British) nor is he open to gender transition (as far as
the interview reveals). Does it make sense to claim, as I have been sug-
gesting, that Kay’s novel imaginatively solves (or, we could say, theorizes)
his fatal struggles? Since Park realizes what Kay imagines (and theorizes),
it is tempting to wish that Paul could have survived to realize that vision
too—to recognize, with Park and Colman, that “roots” are not necessary
and that “being part of the human race” does not depend on “being part
of a continuum that started with Adam and Eve and is going to go on till
kingdom come.”
To make this connection between Paul’s life and the imagined lives in
the novel seems merely, if tantalizingly, speculative. This essay began by

140 TSWL, 39.1, Spring 2020

presenting Paul’s suffering as an extreme case of the harm inflicted on many
by essentialisms of race and gender, but it is risky to generalize or abstract
from one gendered or racialized situation to another. Twenty-first century
transgender studies distinguishes transgender (mis)used as an emblem of
postmodernity from the lived experience of individuals, from whose per-
spective a remark such as “we are all transsexuals” is an impolitic act of
appropriation.63 Although Stryker aligns transgender existence with other
“queer inhumanisms” so as “to abolish what ‘human’ historically has meant,
and to begin to make it mean otherwise,” she also notes disparagingly that
“transgender” became in the 1990s “an overdetermined construct, like
‘cyborg,’ through which contemporary culture imagined a future filled with
new possibilities for being human, or becoming posthuman.”64 The editors
of “The Issue of Blackness” similarly object to the “abstraction of race as a
global modern signifier” and to the violence of what they call “Blackness
as overseen.”65 By the same logic, transcultural adoption should not be
abstracted or generalized either. It cannot be said that “we are all transcul-
tural adoptees” even if the recognitions that accompany such (hi)stories
as Colman’s and Park’s would seem to be widely applicable not only to
anguished adoptees like Paul but to all those who suffer from essentialist
prejudices about race and gender. To say this, even in the name of recogniz-
ing a shared route away from social death, would be to overlook the speci-
ficity of “the embodied experience of the [adopted] speaking subject.”66
Yet Kay’s novel celebrates not only the situation-specific resolution of
Colman’s intersecting troubles but also the power of fiction-making when
she makes both Joss and John into creative artists (a world-making musi-
cian, a painter) and storytellers who invent themselves by reinventing
their origins and teach the lesson of fiction’s liberating power to Colman.
Although in some ways the future Kay imagined and theorized is already (if
unevenly) here, her novel is still worth returning to not only for its compel-
ling narrative of complex relations and shifting identities (and, too, for its
theorization of intersectional adoptive identity) but also for its affirmation
of creative fiction-making as a resource that knows no limit in time and
space. While Park and Paul are individuals whose particular lives cannot
be appropriated for anyone else’s use, fiction is open to all; Joss, John, and
Colman exist only to be read and for readers to find in them what they will.

MARGARET HOMANS is Professor of English and of Women’s, Gender,

and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. She has published widely on
feminist and queer theory and on British and United States women writ-
ers. Her books include Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience

141
in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing (1986) and The Imprint of Another
Life: Adoption Narratives and Human Possibility (2013). She teaches courses
on feminist and queer fiction from Wollstonecraft to the present; on the
intellectual history of feminist, queer, and transgender theory; on race and
gender; and on adoption narratives.

NOTES

1
Monique Wittig prefaced Le Corps Lesbien (1973) with the claim that because
lesbians are “illusionary for traditional male culture . . . our reality is the fictional”
and that her novel is, for now, the only location of that reality; Wittig’s writings
helped to make that fiction reality. See Wittig, The Lesbian Body, trans. David
LeVay (New York: Avon, 1975), ix-x. Similarly, C. Riley Snorton prefaces his
history of black transgender existence by stating his interest in “the mechanics of
invention, . . . the conditions of emergence of things and beings that may not yet
exist,” such as “a vocabulary for black and trans life”; see Snorton, Black on Both
Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2017), xiv.
2
To offer a brief definition, adoption, which moves infants and children from
one social location to another, is a set of loosely related and time-bound prac-
tices—social, legal, and also political and economic—whose meanings shift as they
are contested. The movement of children may be between families, often between
cultures (and classes, races, ethnicities, and religions), and sometimes between
nations; adoption generally moves children from poor to wealthy communities and
from global south to global north.
3
The term “as-if” as in “as-if-begotten” is from Judith Modell, Kinship with
Strangers: Adoption and Interpretations of Kinship in American Culture (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1994), 2.
4
Sheila Ganz, producer and director, Unlocking the Heart of Adoption (San
Francisco: Pandora’s Box Productions, 2003), DVD. The speaker’s full name is Paul
Timothy Wunjech Clawson Marmolejo Beckett.
5
The interviews were conducted in the mid-1990s. This quotation is from the
second of Paul’s three appearances in the film. In the last, he says he is “constantly
struggling” because, although he found his white birth mother, he desperately
needs to find his Filipino birth father, despite fearing his rejection. Paul was raised
to think he was Chinese; this carelessness about his ancestry, which he considered
central to his humanity, contributed to his misery.
6
“Repro-futurity” is another name for what Paul feels he lacks; the queer tempo-
rality critique of normative chronological sequence and clock-time responds in part
to the hegemony of reproductive time. See Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory
and the Death Drive, Series Q (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004).
7
For example, Kim Park Nelson reports the belief shared by some Korean
adoptees that the word “orphan” in Korean means “nonperson”; see Park Nelson,
Invisible Asians: Korean American Adoptees, Asian American Experiences, and Racial
Exceptionalism (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2016), 58.
8
For the sake of argument, this essay often elides differences among transracial

142 TSWL, 39.1, Spring 2020

adoption, transnational adoption, and forms of adoption that cross less visible lines.
For this purpose, I borrow John McLeod’s term “transcultural adoption,” which
aggregates transnational and transracial adoptions and domestic same-race adop-
tions that cross lines of religion or class; see McLeod, Life Lines: Writing Transcultural
Adoption, New Horizons in Contemporary Writing (London: Bloomsbury, 2015).
9
Paul’s response differs in degree but not in kind from the experiences of many
adoptees. First-person adoptee narratives, both domestic and transnational, often
record painful feelings of dislocation and alienation in cultural environments built
on the presumed reality of gendered and racial essences (although they do not typi-
cally diagnose the source of trouble as I do). See for example Jane Jeong Trenka,
The Language of Blood: A Memoir (St. Paul: Borealis Books, 2003) and the personal
essays included in Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption, ed. Trenka, Julia
Chinyere Oparah, and Sun Yung Shin (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2006)
and Pieces of Me: Who Do I Want To Be? Voices for and by Adopted Teens, ed. Robert L.
Ballard (Warren, NJ: EMK Press, 2009). See also ethnographic studies of adoptees’
difficulties in feeling a sense of belonging, such as Barbara Yngvesson, Belonging in
an Adopted World: Race, Identity, and Transnational Adoption (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2010); and Eleana J. Kim, Adopted Territory: Transnational Korean
Adoptees and the Politics of Belonging (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010).
10
Kimberly Leighton, “Addressing the Harms of Not Knowing One’s Heredity:
Lessons from Genealogical Bewilderment,” Adoption and Culture, 3 (2012), 63-107;
and Betty Jean Lifton, Journey of the Adopted Self: A Quest for Wholeness (New York:
Basic Books, 1994), 8. Lifton, a founder of the adoptee rights movement, sums up
this view: “it is unnatural for members of the human species to grow up separated
from and without knowledge of their natural clan,” and much adoption therapy
and activism takes this belief as its foundation (p. 8). The terms “natural” and its
close kin “normal” and “roots” are commonly found in writing about adoption. An
adoptee from Korea states, “I don’t think it’s normal adopting a child from another
country, of another race and paying a lot of money. I don’t think it’s normal to put a
child on a plane away from all its kin and different smells”; quoted in Maggie Jones,
“The Returned,” New York Times Magazine, 17 January 2015, 32. Writing about
Trenka’s The Language of Blood, which has inspired activism opposing transnational
adoption from Korea, Eun Kyung Min describes “the transracial adoptee [as] an
immigrant without an original home, exiled from nowhere, uprooted in the most
total way imaginable, without the memory of what it is she has lost”; see Min, “The
Daughter’s Exchange in Jane Jeong Trenka’s The Language of Blood,” Social Text, 26,
No. 1 (2008), 117.
11
Kim, Adopted Territory, 91.
12
Mark C. Jerng, Claiming Others: Transracial Adoption and National Belonging
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 142.
13
Legal scholar Alice Diver attributes to every child an “inherent biogenetic
culture” and lays out the groundwork, in international law, “to conceptualize as a
basic human right the hypothetical right to avoid origin deprivation”; see Diver,
“Conceptualizing the ‘Right’ to Avoid Origin Deprivation: International Law and
Domestic Implementation,” Adoption and Culture, 3 (2012), 149, 141.
14
Leighton explains the racially essentialist underpinnings of “genealogical
bewilderment”: for believers, “we are born with an urge—essentially to reproduce—
and this urge is to ‘fulfill the tradition’ of the family into which we were born . . . not

143
knowing his true genealogy, an adoptee suffers because he cannot satisfy the desire
to reproduce race”; see Leighton, “Addressing the Harms of Not Knowing One’s
Heredity,” 76-77. Alys Eve Weinbaum argues that in the United States, reproduc-
tion is the reproduction of race: “Ideas of reproductive genealogical connection
secure notions of belonging in those contexts in which the nation is conceived
of as racially homogenous”; see Weinbaum, Wayward Reproductions: Genealogies of
Race and Nation in Transatlantic Modern Thought, Next Wave: New Directions in
Women’s Studies Series (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 8. Contemporary
practices of reproductive technology reveal that racial lines remain rigid when par-
ents make choices about their children, sparing no expense to produce their geneti-
cally “own”—or, second best, racially “matching”—offspring. Weinbaum found no
evidence of “race-blind artificial insemination practices” in United States fertility
clinics and sperm banks (p. 232).
15
Leighton argues that “the normative framework assumed by the diagnosis of
genealogical bewilderment . . . and the reality ascribed to it are actually part of
the cause of the distress people experience rather than a means to alleviate that
distress” (p. 65).
16
For example, “a White/Asian American color line” is “often cross[ed] and
recross[ed]” by Korean adoptees “enacting identities that are sometimes White,
sometimes Asian”; see Park Nelson, Invisible Asians, 14. Chinese adoptees “may
identify with the white culture (and perhaps the racial phenotype) of their white
parents,” while also viewing “Chineseness as a form of cultural capital”; see Andrea
Louie, How Chinese Are You? Adopted Chinese Youth and Their Families Negotiate
Identity and Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2015), 26.
17
Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2006), 77, 154. Starting in the 2000s, queer theory and the-
orizing about diasporas and migration have explicitly intersected around a critique
of reproductive lines and lineage. In addition to Ahmed, see Ann Cvetkovich, who
defends the queering of migrant cultures through intermarriage: “The desire for
‘natural’ reproduction can be understood as a way of refusing the trauma of cultural
dislocation through a fantasy of uninterrupted lineage . . . in which each generation
is expected to produce another like itself”; see Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings:
Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham: Duke University Press,
2003), 122. Anne-Marie Fortier likewise links non-linear migration with queer
coming out in “Making Home: Queer Migrations and Motions of Attachment,”
in Uprootings/Regroundings: Questions of Home and Migration, ed. Ahmed, Claudia
Castaneda, Fortier, and Mimi Sheller (New York: Berg, 2003), 115-35. This
intersectional critique drew together what were in the 1990s distinct queer and
diasporic critiques of linear, singular identities premised on origins, including Eve
Kosofsky Sedgwick’s favoring of the queer “open mesh of possibilities” over “mean-
ings [that] line up tidily” in Tendencies (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993),
8, 3; Sandy Stone’s nonlinear temporality for “posttranssexual” identities in “The
Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto” (1991), in The Transgender
Studies Reader, ed. Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle (New York: Routledge,
2006), 232; Stuart Hall’s and Paul Gilroy’s early 1990s questioning of diasporic and
migrant origins in, for example, Hall’s “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Identity:
Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence and
Wishart, 1990), 222-37; and Avtar Brah’s demonstration that no single “home”

144 TSWL, 39.1, Spring 2020

or linear chronology stabilizes an enduring diasporic identity in Cartographies of
Diaspora: Contesting Identities (New York: Routledge, 1996), 9-10.
18
For Aren Z. Aizura and Trystan Cotten, transitioning is the kind of non-
linear and reversible journeying that Brah and Ahmed envision in diasporic and
queer contexts; see Aizura, “The Persistence of Transgender Travel Narratives,” in
Transgender Migrations: The Bodies, Borders, and Politics of Transition, ed. Cotten
(New York: Routledge, 2012), 139-56; and Cotten, “Migration and Morphing,”
introduction to Transgender Migrations, 1-7. This intersectional scholarship chal-
lenges and deconstructs national and sex/gender boundaries together. For example,
Nael Bhanji, citing Brah’s Cartographies of Diaspora on the distinction between
diasporic “homing desires” and the impossibility of any actual “home,” dismantles,
through the familiar analogy between house and body, the idea of a wrong or right
body or of “transition as a coming home” (the phrase is Jay Prosser’s) for trans-
sexual or transgender subjects; see Bhanji, “Trans/scriptions: Homing Desires,
(Trans)sexual Citizenship and Racialized Bodies,” in The Transgender Studies
Reader 2, ed. Stryker and Aizura (New York: Routledge, 2013), 513, 515; Brah’s
Cartographies of Diaspora, 16, 4; and Jay Prosser, Second Skins: The Body Narratives
of Transsexuality (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 184. For Bhanji and
Song Hwee Lim, pairing disillusionments about gender and about racial/national
belonging aids their discovery; see Lim, “Is the Trans- in Transnational the Trans- in
Transgender?” New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film, 5, No. 1 (2007), 39-52.
On intersectional transgender theory, see also Stryker, Paisley Currah, and Lisa
Jean Moore’s call for the expansion of “trans” beyond “the narrow politics of gender
identity” into “doubly trans” in their “Trans-, Trans, or Transgender?” introduc-
tion to “Trans-,” special issue, Women’s Studies Quarterly, 36, Nos. 3-4 (2008), 15;
Rogers Brubaker’s Trans: Gender and Race in an Age of Unsettled Identities (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2016); and “The Issue of Blackness,” special issue, TSQ:
Transgender Studies Quarterly, 4, No. 2 (2017).
19
Stryker, “Transing the Queer (In)human,” in “Queer Inhumanisms,” spe-
cial issue, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 21, Nos. 2-3 (2015), 229.
Summing up the claims of many who advocate “queer inhumanisms,” Dana
Luciano and Mel Y. Chen write, “the figure of the queer/trans body does not merely
unsettle the human as norm; it generates other possibilities—multiple, cyborgian,
spectral, transcorporeal, transmaterial—for living”; see Luciano and Chen, “Has the
Queer Ever Been Human?,” introduction to “Queer Inhumanisms,” GLQ: A Journal
of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 187. For adoptees discussed in this essay, the goal would
be to demand that “the ‘human’ expand to include me”; see Judith Butler, Undoing
Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004), 2. Alternatively, the goal may be to uncover
“different genres of the human” rather than to refuse the category “human” alto-
gether; see Alexander Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics,
and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014),
2-3.
20
Stryker, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix:
Performing Transgender Rage,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 1, No. 3
(1994), 238. Stryker specifies her medically altered body, but the point remains the
same. Behind this idea lies Donna Haraway’s cyborg, who “skips the step of origi-
nal unity” in a “world without genesis”; see Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs:
Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s,” Socialist Review, 80
(1985), 65-107.
145
 21
Jerng, Claiming Others, vii.
22
Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (New York:
Grove Press, 2011), 5. Even Lifton, best known for defending biocentric norms of
personhood, remarked of her own adoption: “It had allowed me to create myself”;
see Lifton, Twice Born: Memoirs of an Adopted Daughter (New York: McGraw Hill,
1975), 252. For Leighton, being adopted is a privileged “position from which to
investigate the problem of identity in general” because “‘being adopted’ opens up a
space of non-identity (or non-identicalness)” in the self that reveals “the processes
(social, historical, cultural, political, and relational) through which one has come
to be”; see Leighton, “Being Adopted and Being a Philosopher: Exploring Identity
and the ‘Desire to Know’ Differently,” in Adoption Matters: Philosophical and Feminist
Essays, ed. Sally Haslanger and Charlotte Witt (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
2005), 147.
23
Park Nelson, Invisible Asians, 149, 142, 14.
24
Leslie K. Wang, Outsourced Children: Orphanage Care and Adoption in Globalizing
China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016), 15. Scholars who study transra-
cial/transnational adoptees tend to find complex, evolving, sometimes incoherent
adoptee personhood. See for example Heather Jacobson, Culture Keeping: White
Mothers, International Adoption, and the Negotiation of Family Difference (Nashville:
Vanderbilt University Press, 2008); Yngvesson, Belonging in an Adopted World;
Kim, Adopted Territory; and Louie, How Chinese Are You?. Debate is open on what
it means to say that an adoptee is transracial. Kim McKee and twenty-one other
signees explain the distance between their position as transracial adoptees (born
to one race, raised in another) and “transracial” as used to describe Rachel Dolezal
(born and raised white, identifying as black) in “An Open Letter: Why Co-opting
‘Transracial’ in the Case of Rachel Dolezal is Problematic,” Medium, 16 June 2015,
https://medium.com/@Andy_Marra/an-open-letter-why-co-opting-transracial-in-
the-case-of-rachel-dolezal-is-problematic-249f79f6d83c. Transracial adoptees raised
white—such as some discussed in Louie’s How Chinese Are You? and Park Nelson’s
Invisible Asians—could be said to have transracial identities. The ability to cross
and recross a color line and “choose” or navigate “ethnic options” differs for those
in differently racialized groups; see Miri Song, Choosing Ethnic Identity (Cambridge
UK: Polity Press, 2003); and Min Zhou, “Are Asian Americans Becoming White?”
Contexts, 3, No. 1 (2004), 29-37.
25
McLeod, Life Lines, 1, 7, 225.
26
Kath Weston has dismissed lesbian and gay families formed by adoption as
merely conformist, but Butler speculates that non-traditional adoptive families
may create new psychological forms by altering the traditional family romance:
“Is this a loss, which assumes the unfulfilled norm, or is it another configuration
of primary attachment whose primary loss is not to have a language in which to
articulate its terms?”; see Weston, Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1991); and Butler, Antigone’s Claim (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2000), 69. Both David Eng and Laura Briggs welcome
the enabling of unconventional lesbian and gay families by adoption; see Eng,
“Transnational Adoption and Queer Diasporas,” Social Text, 21, No. 3 (2003), 1-37;
and Briggs, Somebody’s Children: The Politics of Transracial and Transnational Adoption
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2012).
27
Soojin Pate, From Orphan to Adoptee: U. S. Empire and Genealogies of Korean

146 TSWL, 39.1, Spring 2020

Adoption, Difference Incorporated (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2014), 129-30, 128, 130. Attacks on adoption, too, are made on the basis of its
implicit queerness. According to Leighton, adoption opponents find it “unsettles
our understanding of family” together with the “racially-based, heteronormative
understanding of identity” on which it depends; see Leighton, “Addressing the
Harms of Not Knowing One’s Heredity,” 68, 70. Leighton is discussing the claim
made by psychologists Erich Wellisch and H. J. Sants that children need to be
raised by “their ‘real’ parents” (p. 65). Bruno Perreau found that popular opposi-
tion to legalizing adoption within same sex marriage in France arose from the
belief that children’s healthy psychological development requires both a man and a
woman as parents; Perreau, The Politics of Adoption: Gender and the Making of French
Citizenship, trans. Deke Dusinberre (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2014).
28
Pate uses her “queer critique primarily to investigate the normative invest-
ments in Korean adoption rather than to frame Korean adoption as part of the
queer diaspora” (p. 129). Sara Dorow and Amy Swiffen point out that adoptions
from China might be expected to but do not produce non-normative families, in
their “Blood and Desire: The Secret of Heteronormativity in Adoption Narratives
of Culture,” American Ethnologist, 36, No. 3 (2009), 563-73. As in Weinbaum’s
account of racially segregated reproductive technology in Wayward Reproductions,
adoption agencies openly engage in racial matching, acknowledging that white
parents want white children by listing children by race and offering children of
color at lower fees; see also Pamela Anne Quiroz, Adoption in a Color-Blind Society
(Lanham MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007); and Christine Ward Gailey, Blue
Ribbon Babies and Labors of Love: Race, Class, and Gender in U. S. Adoption Practice
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010).
29
Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 95.
30
Luciano and Chen, “Has the Queer Ever Been Human?,” 186.
31
Jinthana Haritaworn, “Decolonizing the Non/Human,” GLQ: A Journal of
Lesbian and Gay Studies, 21, Nos. 2-3 (2015), 212.
32
Jerng, Claiming Others, vii; and Stryker, “Transing the Queer (In)human,” 228.
33
Jackie Kay, Red Dust Road (London: Picador, 2010), 43. Kay continues: “We
[adoptees] never know where the truth ends and the story starts and in a way it
doesn’t matter” (p. 43). McLeod comments: “She finds in the productive agency
of storytelling a way of crafting being from the painful possibilities of adoption’s
material fictionality” (p. 217).
34
Kay, Trumpet (New York: Pantheon Books, 1998), 170, 128. Subsequent refer-
ences will be cited parenthetically in the text.
35
A few pages earlier, Colman jumps from the thought of his father as a lesbian
to telling Sophie, “I never fancied boys; no. I’ve always been one hundred per cent
heterosexual, except for those times when I was about sixteen and my mates and me
would have a joint and a communal wank . . . It was just a phase” (p. 57).
36
Those who see Joss as a cross-dressing woman include Alice Walker, who
echoes Sophie’s error by claiming that Joss’s “cross-dressing is [a] personal choice,”
and Alison Lumsden, who observes the constructedness of gender in Trumpet but
errs in calling Joss “a woman who has almost willed herself into being a man”; see
Walker, “As You Wear: Cross-dressing and Identity Politics in Jackie Kay’s Trumpet,”
Journal of International Women’s Studies, 8, No. 2 (2007), 42; and Lumsden, “Jackie
Kay’s Poetry and Prose: Constructing Identity,” in Contemporary Scottish Women

147
Writers, ed. Aileen Christianson and Lumsden (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 2000), 87. A similarly binarizing reading pathologizes Joss’s gender as a
symptom of traumatized black diaspora, as if to be a trans man were a form of
emasculation; see Matt Richardson, The Queer Limit of Black Memory: Black Lesbian
Literature and Irresolution (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2013), 124-29.
37
Diane Wood Middlebrook, Suits Me: The Double Life of Billy Tipton (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1998). Kay authorized the idea that Joss was loosely based
on Tipton, but in part by setting the novel in the 1960s-1980s instead of during
Tipton’s lifetime decades earlier, Kay makes clear that Joss was not simply a woman
in a male-dominated field. As Colman reasons, “The 1960s were supposed to be
cool. . . . Why not a woman playing a fucking trumpet, man, what was wrong with
that?” (p. 57). For a nuanced account of the Tipton/Joss parallel that nonetheless
mistakenly views Joss as having “passed as a man,” see Tracy Hargreaves, “The
Power of the Ordinary Subversive in Jackie Kay’s Trumpet,” Feminist Review, 74
(2003), 5.
38
For example, prior to 2002 the United States Social Security Administration
did not allow changes of gender on official records. In 2002, it began to allow such
changes but only with proof of medical intervention; only in 2013 did it stop requir-
ing such proof. See also Brubaker’s examples of changing social and legal practices
worldwide with regard to transgender acceptance in Trans (pp. 45-46 and 53).
39
Linda Anderson offers a queer reading that follows this group’s lead in
“Autobiographical Travesties: The Nostalgic Self in Queer Writing,” in Territories
of Desire in Queer Culture: Refiguring Contemporary Boundaries, ed. David Alderson
and Anderson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 68-81.
40
In a passage with implications for this episode, McLeod celebrates the scram-
bling of chronology in adoptive life narratives since the “resequencing of calendri-
cal time underscores [an author’s] attempts to free his narrative from the illusions of
genealogical orderliness” (p. 202). His examples include Kay’s Red Dust Road. But
McLeod reads Trumpet’s use of jazz differently, finding in its syncopation and in its
“improvisational and collaborative mode” an aesthetic model for adoption (p. 116).
Hargreaves too links the novel’s form to jazz.
41
Stone calls on “transsexuals [to] take responsibility for all of their history”
(p. 232). Similarly, the transgender writers Cotten cites retain “the traces of their
pasts” (p. 7).
42
Since the 1960s the framework of civil rights has been used to advocate for
adoptees’ “right to know” (at a minimum, access to original birth records); see for
example Lifton, Twice Born, 223. There have been organized adoptee rights move-
ments in every state in the United States except Kansas and Alaska, which never
sealed their birth records, and search memoirs often portray closed records as a vio-
lation of rights. When Jean Strauss was about to read her birth mother’s file at the
hospital where she was born, she was told, “you have no right to any of this informa-
tion,” to which she replied, “if you can see it, and I can’t, to me that’s an invasion
of my privacy”; see Strauss, Beneath a Tall Tree: A Story About Us (Claremont, CA:
Arete Publishing, 2001), 94-96.
43
The trope of the adoptee’s two lives is familiar and poignant. Trenka’s memoir
opens: “My name is Jeong Kyong-Ah. My family register states the date of my birth
. . . / Halfway around the world, I am someone else. / I am Jane Marie Brauer, cre-
ated . . . when I was carried off an airplane” (p. 14).

148 TSWL, 39.1, Spring 2020

 44
Lifton, Twice Born, 10, 4.
45
Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 154.
46
Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” 231.
47
For example, Susan Tompkins urges “you and your child [to] fantasize about
[the birth mother],” in “The Importance of Loving Your Child’s Birth Mother,” in
A Passage to the Heart: Writings from Families with Children from China, ed. Amy
Klatzkin (St. Paul: Yeong and Yeong, 1999), 315.
48
Kay, Red Dust Road, 41.
49
“Tracing” is the British idiom for what in the United States is called “search-
ing.” It is the term Kay uses for her search in Red Dust Road.
50
Trenka, Fugitive Visions: An Adoptee’s Return to Korea (St. Paul: Greywolf,
2009), 98.
51
In nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain, Canada, and the United
States, the stated purpose of some adoptions was to add workers to a family. For
an argument that contemporary adoption is slavery, see Tobias Hübinette, “From
Orphan Trains to Babylifts: Colonial Trafficking, Empire Building, and Social
Engineering,” in Outsiders Within, 139-49. The movement to end transnational
adoption has been termed an abolition movement in a deliberate echo of anti-
slavery discourse; see Daniel Drennan ElAwar, “Adoptee Activism: A Fanonian
Manifesto of Valid Praxis,” paper given at Eighth Biennial Adoption Initiative
Conference, St. John’s University, Queens NY, 29-31 May 2014.
52
For example, Adam Pertman writes that life without knowledge of one’s roots
feels like “living without a vital internal organ”; see Pertman, Adoption Nation: How
the Adoption Revolution is Transforming America (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 93.
Two popular adoption books bear the titles The Primal Wound: Understanding the
Adopted Child (1993) by Nancy Newton Verrier and Pieces of Me: Who Do I Want
to Be? (2009) edited by Robert L. Ballard.
53
Sedgwick, Tendencies, 8; and Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 154.
54
Stryker, “Transing the Queer (In)human,” 229.
55
Butler, Undoing Gender, 2.
56
Common tropes in adoptee memoirs include the yearning to resemble adop-
tive family members and the joy of finding resemblances among birth family. Yet
the belief that resemblance demonstrates biological connection reveals the biocen-
tric bias of western culture; that adoptees can physically resemble their adopted
families challenges that bias. See for example Leighton, “Being Adopted,” 152, 155;
Charlotte Witt’s argument that family resemblance is produced by shared stories in
“Family Resemblances: Adoption, Personal Identity, and Genetic Essentialism,”
in Adoption Matters, 135-45; and Jerng’s discussion in Claiming Others of the social
production of family resemblance in Gish Jen’s The Love Wife (2004). In Ahmed’s
queer critique of family lines, resemblance derives from “proximity”; see Ahmed,
Queer Phenomenology, 123.
57
Pauline Park, “Homeward Bound: The Journey of a Transgendered Korean
Adoptee,” in Homelands: Women’s Journeys Across Race, Place, and Time, ed. Patricia
Justine Tumang and Jenesha de Rivera (Emeryville, CA: Seal Press, 2006), 131;
and Park, “Finding the Authentic Self: Coming Out as a Transgendered Korean
Adoptee,” blog, 22 June 2010, http://www.paulinepark.com/finding-the-authentic-
self-coming-out-as-a-transgendered-korean-adoptee. Park anticipates Park Nelson’s
informants who experience a “sense of duality and of being between two races or

149
nations”; some arrive at “third” possibilities such as “adoptee transnationalism” or
“Korean adoptee” identity; see Park Nelson, Invisible Asians, 186, 146, 186, 140.
58
Park, “Finding the Authentic Self.”
59
Park, “Finding the Authentic Self.” It is tempting to speculate that Park does
not feel “severed” as Paul did because of insights she gained from queer and trans-
gender theory (she read Foucault in graduate school), but Brubaker oversimplifies
in Trans in recommending “thinking with trans” as a model for improving public
perception of transracial identity (p. 4).
60
The 2014 founding of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, a wave of widely
read memoirs and novels—such as Janet Mock’s Redefining Realness: My Path to
Womanhood, Identity, Love, and So Much More (2014), Jennifer Finney Boylan’s
She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders (2013), Imogen Binnie’s Nevada (2013), and
Kim Fu’s For Today I Am a Boy (2014)—and the publication of scholarly antholo-
gies (especially Stryker’s coedited Routledge anthologies of 2006 and 2013) in the
first two decades of the twenty-first century accompanied and facilitated academic
institutionalization in the form of courses, programs, and preferred-pronoun use.
61
Treva Ellison, Kai M. Green, Matt Richardson, and C. Riley Snorton, “We
Got Issues: Toward a Black Trans*/Studies,” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, 4,
No. 2 (2017), 162. See also Snorton, Black on Both Sides.
62
Fending off the 1980s dominance of academic theory as practiced by
Eurocentric scholars, Christian writes: “People of color have always theorized . . .
often in narrative forms. . . . My folk, in other words, have always been a race of
theory”; see Christian, “The Race for Theory,” in Gender and Theory: Dialogues on
Feminist Criticism, ed. Linda Kauffman (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 226.
63
See Rita Felski’s correction of those who generalize too broadly from trans-
sexuality in “Fin de Siècle, Fin de Sexe: Transsexuality, Postmodernism, and the
Death of History,” New Literary History, 27, No. 2 (1996), 337-49. Felski pairs
Jean Baudrillard’s apocalyptic 1993 claim that we have reached the end of history
now that “we are all transsexuals” with Donna Haraway’s “redemptive” use of the
transgendered subject as “cultural appropriations of the figure of transsexuality”; she
adds, “its elevation to the status of universal signifier [risks] homogenizing differ-
ences that matter politically [such as] the difference between those who occasion-
ally play with the trope of transsexuality and those others for whom it is a matter of
life or death” (pp. 337, 338, 341, 347).
64
Stryker, “(De)Subjugated Knowledges: An Introduction to Transgender
Studies,” in Transgender Studies Reader, 8. Instead, she claims, “transgender studies
considers the embodied experience of the speaking subject” (p. 12).
65
Ellison, Green, Richardson, and Snorton, “We Got Issues,” 163, 164. See also
Song, Choosing Ethnic Identity, for cautions about generalizing from one ethnicity to
another. Yet Marquis Bey’s article in “The Issue of Blackness” uses this remark from
Claire Colebrook as an epigraph: “‘in the beginning is “trans”’: . . . what is original
or primary is a not-yet differentiated singularity from which distinct genders, race,
species, sexes, and sexualities are generated in a form of relative stability,” a claim
that universalizes transgender as the fundamental human condition; see Bey, “The
Trans*-ness of Blackness, the Blackness of Trans*-ness,” TSQ: Transgender Studies
Quarterly, 4, No. 2 (2017), 275-76; and Claire Colebrook, “What Is It Like to Be a
Human?,” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, 2, No. 2 (2015), 228.
66
Stryker, “(De)Subjugated Knowledges,” 12.

150 TSWL, 39.1, Spring 2020