Transsexuality in Jackie Kay’s Trumpet

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Jackie Kay’s black Scottish trans novel, Trumpet, (1998) describes how the celebrity trumpet-player, Joss Moody, constructs a masculine identity for himself whilst concealing a female anatomy to everybody except his wife, Millie Moody. The public’s discovery of Joss’ secret body reveals how dominant social ideologies expect a female anatomy to be an indicator of a female gender and vice versa. In Kay’s ‘unwrapping’ of the transsexual body, she also deconstructs this sex/gender system and the ‘normative’ heterosexual economy attached to the body. However, according to transgender theorist, Jason Cromwell, the sex which one sees does not necessarily signify the sex they can be. Although Joss is anatomically female, Kay explores how he becomes a man through a gendered performance of masculinity. As Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble argues, gender performativity relates to the ways in which we enact ‘normative’ gender roles and appearances, such as walking, dressing or talking ‘like a man’. Kay’s powerful novel dissects the human body and deconstructs these cultural discourses and the social symbols attached to the gendered and sexed body.