One of several glaring omissions in this book, by the way, is any mention of social media pressure, which figures very strongly in every story of teenage “transition” I’ve heard over the past few years. Boyne, author of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, wrote a 2019 children’s story about a trans teenager, My Brother’s Name is Jessica.

Author John Boyne Faces Backlash From Trans - GCN Irish Author John Boyne Faces Backlash From Trans - GCN

The blurb didn’t give away a lot, and my bookstore is a bit disorganised (YA, middle school fiction, children’s fiction all in one area. This was in the same bookshelf as Twilight), so I had initially come into it expecting YA, around 15/16+. I was pleasantly surprised to find the protagonist 13 years old, and his sibling only four years older. He was supported from the Hay audience by the Horrid Henry writer, Francesca Simon: “I am American and I am female and my main character is a little British boy.” I mean, trans people in general have the highest suicide, murder, and rape statistics. It’s horrifying, and throughout the book I was worried for her. Children's publisher Puffin has said it is proud to be publishing John Boyne’s novel about a transgender teen, after the book was labelled "transphobic" by some campaigners, and an article the author wrote in the Irish Times about the subject received criticism on social media. The book My Brother's Name is Jessica, out tomorrow (18th April), is about a boy’s journey to understanding and accepting his transgender sister. In writing My Brother’s Name is Jessicamy hope is that children and young adults—particularly ones who are perhaps not already familiar with transgender issues—will come to this book and start to understand that anyone struggling with these issues needs support and compassion, not judgment.I have tried to write the best novel that I can. I might have succeeded or I might have failed, but I stand by it. I welcome debate and am interested in people’s views on this subject. I do not believe that the trans community bears any relationship to, or any responsibility for the abuse I have received online. I stand 100% behind all trans people, I respect them as brave pioneers, I applaud their determination to live authentic lives despite the abuse they also receive, and I will always do so.”

In short, this book is not Jessica’s. It doesn’t belong to her. It’s about everyone else but her. And when you look at it like that, it’s not hard to see why the trans community has refused to embrace it as theirs. Some have come to Boyne’s defence, protesting that all fiction writers attempt to tell stories from different perspectives and that he should be trusted to have done the necessary research. I’m not saying, by the way, that Boyne should have written the story differently. As with the awful ITV drama, Butterflies, which aired last year, I’m saying the story shouldn’t have been written at all. As I write for LGBTQIA+ young adults, seeing this book at my local bookshop, with its beautiful rainbow pattern, was pretty exciting. I haven’t seen a lot of young adult literature that is so open with having a transgender character, and I was looking forward to seeing how the character was represented. She said if she had to write about her experience, “I would be writing about American Jewish girls who grew up in Malibu on the beach”.

John Boyne deletes Twitter account after trans article backlash

He said he had written books about the Holocaust, first world war soldiers, the Russian revolution and the Bounty. “I’ve never been to any of those places, I’ve never done any of those things and nobody ever criticised me for it. If we say we can only write about our own experiences, the corollary of that, for example, is that a transgender writer can only write about transgender characters. This book was excellent as a way to speak to people of all ages. The topic of gender was broached well for young people, young adults, and adults. It talked about the complex issues surrounding it, acceptance, and difficulties, while also being an easy, upbeat read. I found the book very well done. Not only was the writing excellent, as to be expected, but the choice of protagonist, point of view, and characters were well executed. The story felt strong, and the message, and effectiveness could have been defeated if not for these choices. He has a girlfriend who betrays him, finishing their relationship when he confides that he’s “really a girl” and in no time at all everyone at his unconvincingly illiberal London school knows. The protagonist, Sam, is a 13 year old boy whose parents both work high up in the British government. He doesn’t have a lot of friends and is teased for being dyslexic. His brother, Jason, has adored him since day dot, is the captain of the football/soccer team, is very popular, and the reason why Sam is only teased and not bullied.I quite liked reading the books written for their age groups before passing them on to one or other of them, as long as it was a good story that was well-written with believable characters and I didn’t have to constantly remind myself that whatever I was reading was written for youngsters, as I did with John Boyne’s latest offering . Although according to this interview, he claims not to write with a particular audience in mind, that just doesn’t ring true with this book which, of course, I only bought because people were calling for it to be boycotted. If there hadn’t been a fuss made about it, it wouldn’t have been on my radar and how depressing it is that the would-be censors of today have learned nothing from the past.

My Brother’s Name is Jessica – Book Review – Spoilers My Brother’s Name is Jessica – Book Review – Spoilers

In an article published on April 13th in The Irish Times, titled “Why I support trans rights but reject the word ‘cis,'” Boyne wrote “it will probably make some unhappy to know that I reject the word ‘cis,’ the term given by transgender people to their nontransgender brethren. I don’t consider myself a cis man; I consider myself a man.”He expects The Echo Chamber will provoke something of a reaction but is braced for it. “I just turned 50. And as much as I don’t like drama, and I don’t like trouble, I do think that it’s important that your work should be strong enough that it inspires some kind of debate. And antipathy towards it is not necessarily a negative. At the end of this book, I mention Kingsley Amis’s line that if you’re not annoying somebody with your writing, you’re not doing anything right. And it’s not that I set out to annoy people, but I do want my work to be more interesting in that way than perhaps it once was. I want to think about the world we live in and to challenge it. And if that means upsetting some people, well, that’s what literature is supposed to do.”

YA novel about transgender teen Puffin defends John Boyne’s YA novel about transgender teen

Note, Jason doesn’t merely wish he is a girl. He is “pretty sure” he is one. How, for crying out loud? The exploration of why this particular young man might believe he’s a young woman, if it takes place at all, does so during sessions with a therapist that readers aren’t privy to. As for the others, Sam, our narrator, is a thirteen-year-old boy who spends most of the novel either blaming Jessica for the way his classmates bully him, or worried that he might “catch” being transgender. Their parents are a conservative MP and her secretary, both of whom spend most of the novel being racist, bigoted, or cuthroatedly ambitious, all while openly claiming they’re none of those things. There are very few moments when they are shown to be at all sympathetic to their kids. Most of these are shoehorned in, either by Sam or Jessica proclaiming how “good” or “supportive” their parents are (without those traits ever being demonstrated), or by Mom and Dad Waver admitting, as if it were a great confession, that their jobs and feelings might not be the most important thing after all, given the bigger picture. Of course, they then return to ignoring Sam and lying about Jessica in the next scene. The only time I refer to people as being cis is when discussing trans issues,” Martin has written in The Irish Times. “This is to distinguish them from transgender and non-binary people.

Lately, Jason has been growing his hair out a bit, and it’s staring to look quite feminine. He’s been a bit distant lately, and Sam misses how close they were. What those calling for the boycott of this book illustrate above all else is how the word ‘transphobic’ has become essentially meaningless. It has also become ineffective as a weapon brandished in an attempt to silence anyone who challenges the ideology and falsehoods promoted by trans activists. In Boyne’s case, this seems to amount to objecting to the prefix ‘cis’. The accusation of transphobia should be reserved for those who advocate and carry out discrimination and violence against trans-identified people. Most of those referred to as “transphobes”– including Boyne – don’t do that. In fact, Boyne is a self-declared supporter of the nebulous “trans community” and, as I said in my previous blog about him, he is so much in denial about the hatred, bigotry and violence promoted by so many of those who’ve adopted the ‘trans’ label, that he can’t bear to believe it’s true, in spite of the wealth of evidence. Although Jason is reasonably intelligent and should have been able to anticipate their reaction, he is also a typically selfish member of ‘Generation Z’ and it just doesn’t occur to him to wait until he is through his exams and being cosetted in one of those safe spaces laughingly known as a ‘university’ – and his mother ensconced at 10 Downing Street – before coming out as transgender, instead of doing so at the worst possible time for himself and everyone else. If only he’d waited, there would have been no story for John Boyne to tell and we would have been spared the excruciating final chapter where, in the tradition of all the dreariest fairy tales, we learn that everything has turned out perfectly, however far-fetched it seems. Graham, without equivocation, without excuses, and without evasion: you were right, I was wrong, and I apologise.” Speaking out against trans activists