[Fictioneering
is a very occasionally occasional series in which I say pretentious
things about the novels that were monumentally influential on my
developing psyche. In other words, blame these books.]
N.B.
I'm going to spoil the crap out of this book, because nothing I'm
about to say will make any sense unless you know the twist at the
end. If you care about remaining unspoiled for a 35-year-old
children's book, find
a copy somewhere and read it stat; otherwise, consider yourself
fairly warned.
I
loved this book. At age ten or eleven, I checked it out of the
school library (because, in the course of five largely friendless
years at a school with a fairly small library, I read most things in
the school library), and I loved it so very, very much that I needed
a copy of my own. However, I didn't dare ask my parents to buy it for
me, for fear that they might ask me just why I loved it so. Inspired
by my also-beloved copy of Chinese
Cinderella, I ended up
copying the entirety of Tyke Tiler by
hand into an exercise book with a magenta cover.
Of
course, my situation was in no way similar to Adeline's in Chinese
Cinderella. Abused and neglected
by her stepmother, Adeline finds hope in a friend's copy of A
Little Princess. She copies it
out by hand of necessity, because she knows her stepmother would
never buy her anything that might give her pleasure. My parents, on
the other hand, encouraged my obsessive love of reading and kept me
well supplied with novels. In retrospect, there is absolutely no
reason why they wouldn't have bought me a copy of Tyke
Tiler if I'd selected it next
time we went to the bookstore: it's a Carnegie medal-winner, and,
even if they'd never heard of it, they knew that my taste in
literature has (unlike my taste in film) never run to the trashy.
They had seen how dog-eared with rereading my copies of The
Hobbit and Anne
of Green Gables and Roll
of Thunder, Hear My Cry became.
They knew of my disdain for Goosebumps and
Sweet Valley. A few
years later, they would witness my first feeble attempt at teenage
rebellion sputter and die when I discovered, much to my
disappointment, that the reason they disapproved of my reading
Interview with the Vampire was
not because it was eye-openingly salacious and grown-up, but because
it was not very good literature.
My
parents trusted my taste in books. They would have bought me a
paperback of Tyke Tiler if
I had only asked for one.
The
Turbulent Term of Tyke Tiler is
a very British school story, chronicling the fairly episodic
adventures of Tyke and BFF Danny as they get themselves into and out
of various scrapes. As such, though it's entertainingly written and
the child's-perspective narration is pretty convincing, there is
nothing too remarkable about it – until the very end.
Throughout the book, there is a running gag that Tyke's real name is
unbelievably terrible. Tyke runs around with Danny, climbing all over
school buildings, fighting bullies, pestering older siblings, and
refusing to disclose the dreaded real name. Then, right at the end of
the book, Tyke is climbing on the school roof, about to ring the old
school bell, when hated teacher Mrs Somers shouts: “Get down at
once, Theodora Tiler, you naughty, disobedient girl!”
I
loved that. I loved that.
The revelation that Tyke, headstrong and physical and with male best
friends, was actually a girl, was really, really important to me, and
I had no way of articulating why. Of course, it overturns the
reader's assumption that a character nicknamed Tyke, especially one
who acted in this way, would be a boy; and it's a sadly
rare instance of a gender-non-conforming girl who doesn't
have an in-text femme
counterpart.
Those
are things I could, even at the age of eleven, probably have at least
attempted to articulate. But there was something else going on –
something I instinctively knew must be kept secret from my parents,
my peers, and even to some extent from myself. And, since I've
already been kicked
out of feminism for violation of Internet Feminism Bylaw #5712,
“everyone
is cis unless explicitly noted,” I might as well just say it,
and yarbles to the haters: the text does
support a reading of Tyke as trans*.
(You don't have to agree, a cis reading is just as valid, blah blah
covering my ass trying to appease the unappeasable.)
And
no, I don't think that
every character who ever acts in conventionally masculine ways must
be a guy (and believe me, if I ever find a reason why I think I
might be one other than “I just kind of do” I will surely let you
know); but the framing of the narrative sets up the gender revelation
as an unexpected twist, and at the very least that should invite some
Deep Thoughts about the nature of gender (for those of you who
haven't been having Deep Thoughts about gender every single waking
moment for the last twelve or eighteen months). (And, while Tyke's
appearance is never described in the book, have a gander at the
androgynous moppet who stars in the rather
charming mini-series.)
One of the weird things about trans*liness is how you find yourself
recalibrating what you believe about gender to align with what you
need. A website that
default genders you as male doesn't anger you quite the way you know
it should, because you spend so much of your time trying
to get gendered male. You suddenly find that you have a use for some
of the traditional gender roles you've so long rejected, because
they're a societal shorthand for your embryonic masculinity. And you
infuriate the Internet Feminist Hivemind by reading
gender-non-conforming characters as trans*, because you need the
fictional worlds you so dearly love to reflect and affirm you, and
unless you project that onto them they just don't.
But I think I've always read Tyke Tiler as a trans*man, years before
I had the words or the processes or the self-confidence or the
independence to know what I was doing. I think that's why I loved
this book so profoundly, and I think it's why I had to keep it a
secret.
I
believe that magenta exercise book is still in a drawer in my old
bedroom in my parents' house. Through all the years, the
transcontinental moves, the periodic Throwing Away Of Old Notebooks,
the later-regretted donations of Childhood Novels I Am Too Grown-Up
For, I hung onto my handwritten copy of The Turbulent Term
of Tyke Tiler, keeping it safely
squirreled away in a messy drawer. Now, finally, at the age of
twenty-three, I am opening it.
