Li Kotomi (李琴峰) is a fairly successful Taiwanese-Japanese lesbian novelist, essayist, and translator with a name excitingly rendered multilingually in English. In 2023 she surprisingly won the prestigious and usually-fairly-conservative Akutagawa Ryūnosuke Prize with her novella The Island where Red Spider Lilies Bloom (彼岸花が咲く島 Higanbana ga saku shima), she’s translated all of her fiction writing for Mandarin publication (a very cool practice very Jhumpa Lahiri-core), and her Gunzo Prize-winning 2017 debut novel Solo Dance (独舞 Hitorimai) has been translated into English (by Arthur Reiji Morris) and Italian.
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| ID: Li Kotomi sitting by the edge of what looks very much like Lincoln's Rock in Australia. Source: likotomi.com |
Li Kotomi came out as trans on her website and various social media on the 20th of November last year, Trans Day of Remembrance. She’d changed her name and documents after her BA in Japanese at National Taiwan University, then moved to Japan and went stealth for 11 years in which she did a Master’s degree at Waseda University, worked for years at a company, then built a career as a writer—until persistent online stalking forced her to out herself. What a life! It might seem strange to you that she went to so much effort to distinguish herself as a queer writer (and an outspoken trans advocate) while pretending the whole time to be a cis lesbian, but I used to fantasise about doing almost the same thing. I’ve translated some sections of her ‘Outing Statement’ on her website below:
“I, Li Kotomi, am a lesbian. Since my first work I have always written LGBTQ+ stories, actively campaigned for the legalisation of gay marriage, and participated in Pride parades almost every year. This information has always been publicly available and is unequivocally true.
However, today, on Trans Day of Remembrance, I would like to get another coming out over with—I, Li Kotomi, am simultaneously also transgender.”
It struck me how she feels the need to restate her support for and participation in the queer community before revealing that she’s trans. There is (in my limited experience) fairly little knowledge or understanding of trans issues within Japanese queer culture. There is, as in the West, an understanding of transfemininity as firstly the province of porn and secondly being essentially an extension of being a gay man. Meanwhile, Japanese lesbian culture (at least in the big cities) is characterised by lesbian bars and other women-only spaces, which sometimes advertise trans-inclusiveness but I tend to feel that most of the clientele would likely view the presence of a trans lesbian as the intrusion of a potentially dangerous straight man with a crossdressing fetish. Transness is a foreign and unusual concept, just like Li is herself inescapably foreign and unusual for being Taiwanese—queerness in Japan in general is also slightly foreign and unusual, but different oppressed groups are more than capable of fiercely attacking each other over perceived slights. Notable among the catalogue of online haters Li viciously takes down on her Note.com is a Japanese trans lesbian twitter activist who accused her (before she came out) of appropriating transness by publicly advocating for trans people in a way she didn’t like. Back to Li’s statement:
“I am, in honesty, reluctant to describe myself in this way. This is because I don’t consider the label ‘transgender’ to be part of my ‘identity’, instead being no more than a ‘state’ or ‘attribute’. Although I have been given no choice other than to live in this state, it is not my true nature.
However, it is true that I was registered male at birth and there was a time when I lived in the state of being thought of as male. That time is like a curse-spawned nightmare to me, which I never again want to look back on, and I have no intention of recounting it in detail here.
Later I became aware that I had always lived in the wrong gender. Having to live in the wrong gender produces irresolvable discordance and conflict with the world. One day I reached a critical point where life became impossible to continue, and I realised I could not go on living that way.
I decided to kill myself and be reborn.
The reborn me is a woman. I am extremely happy with the me I am now.
So, I am a woman. I am absolutely not a ‘biological/innate/physical/etc. male’”
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| ID: Li Kotomi. Source: likotomi.com |
Putting aside my fun language facts and turning more to what Li actually means: if you view transition as something you did and got over with, then it doesn’t feel great to have to identify yourself by that one thing you did once for the rest of your entire life.
It’s something I’ve struggled with myself—what is there to celebrate about being trans? It’s not necessarily a continuous obvious part of your life forever like a sexuality is. Every so often you hear well-meaning and well-educated allies talk about how great it is that trans people explode ideas of gender and performativity and open up so much creativity in their self-expression; but the 17-year-old newly-out erin did not appreciate those high concepts. All I ever wanted was to just be a woman and be comfortable in myself, and forget about all the years I spent closeted living on autopilot constantly miserable and barely functioning: as far as I was concerned I had no special relationship with performativity or any sort of masculine identity, and wouldn’t know how to play around with those if I tried. I really just felt and often still feel a bit like one of those TikTok babies supposedly flooding into primary schools who’ve never been taught how to write with a pen or other fundamental life skills, and get inevitably left behind.
All this is because I was extremely repressed and alone—lots of other trans people are much better at handling their own identities. But I felt like I recognised Li’s feelings in ‘I decided to kill myself and be reborn’, a concept that feels a little retro which I instinctively shy away from and because it’s not like I was any less myself or a woman before I came out (and I feel like it’s also used to justify transphobia). It’s the sort of self-narrative that comes from growing up with a sense of yourself as absolutely defined by gender, so that changing your gender presentation necessitates the total death of the old—or, as in this case, growing up in a context (rural Taiwan) where queerness is simply impossible, and you have no way of constructing your identity as being queer without leaving your entire life behind and starting anew somewhere else.
“In fact I never wanted to come out. Currently, not only in Japan but in many countries in the world, anti-trans backlash is on the rise. It is currently much too risky to come out. If I could, I would have taken this secret to my grave.
[...]
I couldn’t cause trouble to anyone. So I had to leave my home behind, leave Taiwan behind, and flee as far away from my past and my old self as I could.
People who have left their homes or who stay in the closet carry with them circumstances and hardships which cannot be simply explained to others. Exactly these sorts of circumstances are why I left Taiwan behind and fled to Japan. When I was in Taiwan I experienced many forms of oppression, discrimination, bullying, and harassment. As long as I was in Taiwan, I could not live in safety. That is why I fled to Japan.
Life was going well in Japan and I was able to fulfil my childhood dream of becoming a writer. If I could have, I really wouldn’t want to take the risk of coming out.
[...]
This is the grotesque reality we live in.
I did not want to come out. To be outed is to have your options snatched away one by one in front of you like your fingernails being torn out, to be mentally and physically cornered, piece by piece, until before you notice you have been left no option but to come out.
That is why I had no option but to come out on this Trans Day of Remembrance.
This is an elegy to the decency of the masses, and an elegy to myself.
I have not come out of my own free will, but as the result of my assailants’ hate crimes.”
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| ID: Li Kotomi and others on TDoR. Source: Li Kotomi's Facebook page. |
Before we go into that there’s one troubling thing to note. Protagonist Chō Norie (趙紀惠) is left severely traumatised after being sexually assaulted for her lesbian identity shortly before entering university, in what seems quite obviously (though we know nothing definite about Li’s life and experiences and shouldn’t assume) to be a poorly-thought-out substitute for the traumas of being trans. These are very clearly not experiences that anyone should be equating or comparing to each other. Li wrote a blog post about her online stalking experiences a week after she came out which seems to follow similar lines of thought:
“What Jiang Xiangling and others have done to me is unmistakably a cyber-lynching [sic], sexual harassment, and gender-based violence. Although they didn’t directly lay hands on my body or insert a penis inside me, it was unmistakably gender-based violence. You could contend that verbal gender-based violence is less severe than physical gender-based violence, but no-one can say it is not gender-based violence.
It is lamentable that society demands victims maintain serene composure when they make a complaint. If you are not calmly composed, your complaints will be treated as having lost their legitimacy. Because of that I strive to maintain composure even though my mind and body have been worn out. If you show the slightest emotion, abusers can exploit it, and people around you may treat you as a curiosity and make fun of you.
But, after more than two years of being bullied and attacked, why should composure be the only thing permitted me?”
When you feel persecuted it is very easy to feel completely alone and misunderstood and judged by all the world: it is a natural instinct to try to make yourself understood as a figure of pity, and, for instance, to reach for an extreme comparison to try to articulate the completely overwhelming emotions you’re experiencing and place yourself into a recognisable context. That does not make it a good thing to do, but I think Li needs a little understanding and empathy. We are disconnected bystanders judging her, and even when some of the things she says seem horribly distasteful, we can at least work to understand the emotions that led her to say them.
So anyway Norie has a terrible traumatising secret which despite regular therapy and an extensive feminist education she cannot help but view as an unthinkable life-destroying horror, and which pursues her across the novel in a way that feels like it can be very closely mapped onto what we could imagine Li’s life to have been like. So, even though that sort of biographical reading is a very naughty thing to do, I’m going to do it anyway—I feel like autofiction blurs the lines with this sort of thing or even encourages it. Norie’s life at National Taiwan University, as Li’s very possibly was as well, is lonely and dominated by the fear of anyone knowing and gossiping about her. Having fled to Japan she finds a few friends but not happiness. In a particularly moving scene, she tells her secret on New Year’s Eve to a girlfriend of several months, who immediately and scornfully leaves her. A Taiwanese friend’s ex stalks her to Japan and recognises Norie, eventually emailing her secret to all her coworkers. Unable to cope with dealing with this in any way and feeling that the fragile life she was constructing is now destroyed, Norie resolves to die. She goes on a world tour culminating in Mardi Gras in Sydney, sees many beautiful sights and meets many happy queer people, decides that she finds the world very beautiful and happy but that she cannot fit into it, and throws herself off Lincoln’s Rock in the Blue Mountains in Australia. Except of course she wakes up in hospital with her high school ex-girlfriend Yang Haoxue beside her bed, who has saved her at the last second and offers to take her back to Taiwan—an offer she refuses as she resolves to return to the life she began to create in Japan, but to live it rather than just trying to fit in; to become a writer.
Solo Dance is quite a depressing book! It is permeated throughout with trauma and thoughts of death, and the question of how to fit yourself into the world when the world cannot accept you. As a trans person it is difficult to escape the fear of being judged by anyone who notices who you are. It infects every human interaction in your life and creates a constant feeling of mistrust or deceit; you’re overwhelmed with anxious thoughts about how much people know, and you never feel entirely safe or open with anyone you’re talking to—and when the discovery of your transness could lead to total rejection from your friends and family or the destruction of your career and life, this easily becomes completely unendurable.
The only way to keep on living is to create a safe environment for yourself in which you can live authentically. Also present in Solo Dance are little enclaves of potential safety: abroad in San Francisco and Australia, in Jihui’s old queer friends in Taiwan, and ultimately in the new friends she can find in the Shibuya lesbian scene. The way forward is to build community and new safe spaces, and perhaps it’s because of that that Li chose to come out on Trans Day of Remembrance, alongside an open letter from other queer authors supporting trans rights: she is building her own community. The ‘outing statement’ on Li’s Chinese-language Facebook page has an extra conclusion not included in the Japanese version, which I’ve translated below:
“But we exist. We live. We want to go on living.
I came out now because the cyberbullying I have been subjected to gave me no alternative. As stated above, I do not identify as being ‘transgender’, and so from now on I won’t give this attribute any special emphasis, just as I don’t give any special emphasis to my blood type or my birth weight
But since I am now completely out of the closet, I wholeheartedly wish that my experiences are able to bring some amount of courage to the LGBTQ+ community. Look: a lesbian, a trans person, after having suffered through oppression and bullying and fleeing to a foreign country, is able to fulfil her wildest dreams of becoming an Akutagawa Prize-winning writer!
I don’t want to be the next Qiu Miaojin. Our community has been engulfed by too many deaths. It’s time to start moving forwards.
This is our time. This is our life. We must not let anyone take away our future.”
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| ID: a well-placed cat on the Philosopher's Path a few doors down from Hōnen-in. Credit: Erin Reynolds. |
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other erin
links:
‘Outing Statement’ (Japanese)
https://likotomi.com/info/707.html
‘Outing Statement’ (Mandarin) https://www.facebook.com/LiKotomi/posts/pfbid02Le1bRLx7DEVYMTaMeQbcAj92KKBfN9DWxbGgbCrWzdxdnbRUr4M15nZBiHyLEEPgl
‘Being unable to talk about gender-based violence’ (Japanese) https://note.com/li_kotomi/n/n7ca142697b35