Read as part of CBR17 bingo: TBR
The trans experience is messy. It’s muddled. It has no straight (heh) line. There is little synthesis of other persons trans experiences. To paraphrase a famous saying about autistic folk: if you’ve met one person that’s trans, that means you’ve encountered only one trans experience.
And I think that’s what Hazel Jane Plante is going for with this one. A beautiful, painful capturing of a friendship that meant more, it’s a reminder that trans people tell these stories because they are not given the words so they must develop them on their own. And because trans people’s language is so vulgar to so many, they often experience it through different media, media that is not specifically trans but symbolic and/or allegorical.
So while Hazel Jane Plante did not create a compelling fictional tv show in Little Blue, she did do a good enough job of explaining why the show meant so much to Vivian and why Vivian meant so much to the narrator, the author if you will. A shared experience, perhaps something more, but centered around a search for identity and the peace trans people grasp for when they think they have found it.
There is perhaps a bit too much of an arcane nature to the fictional show/encyclopedia that makes this one fall short of greatness but it will definitely be worth a revisit and I think that’s part of the point as to why Hazel Jane Plante wrote it the way she did. It will stay with me a long time, especially those last three pages.