"I've lived a completely ordinary life, so much that I don't
know how to write a transgender or queer or Appalachian story,
because I don't feel like I've lived one.... Though, in searching for
ways to write myself in my stories, maybe I can find power in this
ordinariness."
Raised in southeast Ohio, Stacy Jane Grover would not describe her
upbringing as "Appalachian." Appalachia existed farther
afield—more rural, more country than the landscape of her hometown.
Grover returned to the places of her childhood to reconcile her
identity and experience with the culture and the people who had
raised her. She began to reflect on her memories and discovered that
group identities like Appalachian and transgender are linked by more
than just the stinging brand of social otherness.
In Tar Hollow Trans, Grover explores her transgender
experience through common Appalachian cultural traditions. In "Dead
Furrows," a death vigil and funeral leads to an investigation of
Appalachian funerary rituals and their failure to help Grover cope
with the grief of being denied her transness. "Homeplace"
threads family interactions with farm animals and Grover's coming out
journey, illuminating the disturbing parallels between the American
Veterinary Association's guidelines for ethical euthanasia and the
World Professional Association for Transgender Health's guidelines
for transgender care.
Together, her essays write transgender experience into broader
cultural narratives beyond transition and interrogate the failures of
concepts such as memory, metaphor, heritage, and tradition. Tar
Hollow Trans investigates the ways the labels of transgender and
Appalachian have been created and understood and reckons with the
ways the ever-becoming transgender self, like a stigmatized region,
can find new spaces of growth.