Virginia Woolf’s ‘Orlando’: The First Triumph Of Trans Literature?

Jeanette Winterson: “The novel … begins with a famously disingenuous sentence: ‘He, for there could be no doubt about his sex … ‘ and then we spend the rest of the novel doubting exactly that. Is Orlando the first English language trans novel? It is, yet in the most playful way. Orlando manages his transition with grace and a profound truth. On seeing himself as a herself for the first time in the mirror, she remarks: ‘Different sex. Same person.'”