Parrotfish by Ellen Wittlinger

What sets Ellen Wittlinger’s latest novel, Parrotfish, apart from other young adult queer fiction that features a trans character (such as David Levithan’s Boy Meets Boy or Julie Anne Peters’ Luna) is that Parrotfish tells the story of a young FTM, Grady.

Given the historical trend of focusing on transexual, transgender, and MTF women not only in academic and scholarly realms, but also in fiction and memoir, Wittlinger should be commended in turning her focus to transexual, transgender, and FTM men—perhaps even more so because she deals with a transboy whereas other authors have told the stories of transmen.

Parrotfish opens with Grady’s assertion of himself as a transyouth. His joy in having come out as trans is apparent, clearly buoyed by his feelings of finally being about to tell his truth, “And the truth was, inside the body of this strange, never-quite-right girl hid the soul of a typical, average, ordinary boy” (9).

Like many trans coming of age/coming to be stories, one of our initial points of introduction revolves around naming. About his chosen name, Grady says, “’It’s a name that could belong to either gender...Also, I like the gray part of it—you know, not black, not white. Somewhere in the middle’” (6). Other elements of Grady’s transition that Wittlinger touches upon includes binding his breasts, changing his wardrobe, and negotiating bathrooms.

Perhaps most significantly, however, are the ways in which we travel alongside Grady as he manages his transition in relationship to the people in his life—family, friends (old and new), teachers, classmates, cashiers, etc. It is through these human interactions that the richness of Wittlinger’s novel arises. To her credit, Wittlinger portrays a wide range of characters’ reactions to Grady’s transition. By offering several different points of identification, Wittlinger not only makes Parrotfish a novel that can potentially resonate with a wide and diverse readership, but also constructs a nuanced tale of transyouth living. These elements make Parrotfish a novel that simultaneously sympathetically opens readers’ hearts up to Grady’s struggles, while pointing to the need and importance for us to more closely examine our roles, responsibilities, and culpabilities in these struggles. (After all, despite its beginning, Parrotfish is still a coming of age/coming out novel and so retains the traditional arc of having to overcome struggle.)

One character of note to look forward to is Kita Charles. I was indeed quite impressed with Wittlinger’s development of this biracial character and the connections between sexuality and race that she embodies and highlights.

(I certainly could have done without the “parrotfish” story line which suggests a biological etiology for being transgender, but given the prominence of the question of etiology, it is not unexpected.)



As usual, some of my favorite passages:

Wittlinger, Ellen. Parrotfish. New York: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, 2007.

(9) And the truth was, inside the body of this strange, never-quite-right girl hid the soul of a typical, average, ordinary boy.

(19) But you can only lie about who you are for so long without going crazy.

(33-34) It occurred to me that the male members of my family seemed to be taking this better than the females, and I wondered why that was. Did the women feel like I was deserting them by deciding to live as the opposite sex? Maybe for Dad and Charlie, it didn’t seem strange to want to be male, since that’s what they were. But Mom and Laura—and, of course, Eve—acted like I was [end page 33] betraying them somehow. Would I have to give them up if I wasn’t a girl anymore? I hoped not. I hoped that changing my gender wouldn’t mean losing my entire past.

(131) When I decided I was a boy, I realized that if I wanted to pass, I’d have to learn to walk differently, talk differently, dress differently, basically act differently than I did as a girl. But why did we need to act at all? A quick look around Buxton High provided numerous cases of girls acting like girls and boys acting like boys—and very few people acting like themselves.

(more on Parrotfish to come)