Female cross-dressing is not a new concept in children’s literature. The theme of female disguise, where a female character dresses herself as man, is evident in a broad spectrum of children’s literature. The use of female cross-dressing in children’s literature is traditionally dissociated from the adult-oriented notions of transvestism and transsexualism, as it lacks the requisite elements of sexuality and gender dysphoria which characterize the contemporary transgender arena. Children’s texts which depict a female cross-dressing paradigm of this nature are typically located in a historical, overtly patriarchal context which clearly segregates the sexes and limits feminine behaviour. The emergence of a sub-set of children’s texts which depict female transvestism in a modern context, however, signifies a changing attitude to transgender issues and the appropriateness of presenting such potentially problematic concepts to younger audiences. The divergence between the depiction of cross-dressing in children’s literature and transgender reality is slowly being addressed. The representation of cross-dressing in Young Adult texts such as Johnny My Friend, by Peter Pohl, and Touch Me, by James Moloney, is closely related to contemporary ‘adult’ transgender concepts, and embraces the subjective complexity which these notions encompass. The traditional dichotomy between children’s literature (playful, harmless, experimental) and adult (sexual, deviate, abnormal, psychological) cross-dressing is disregarded in these particular texts, resulting in a portrayal of cross-dressing which refuses to disengage itself from reality and explicitly involves itself in the previously deemed adults-only world of transgender.

This paper will consider the way in which gender is constituted within contemporary children’s female-to-male cross-dressing literature as performance-based and subject to individual manipulation. It will also discuss the construction of female cross-dressing subjectivity in relation to changing and evolving gender definitions, and the representation of transgender sexuality in literature produced for adolescents. The purpose of this approach is to examine the manner in which cross-dressing is used in modern children’s literature as a strategy to subvert conventional gender categories, and to explore the increasingly evident tendencies of children’s texts to depict cross-dressing in accordance with its social reality.

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