Gender Identity In Jackie Kay's Trumpet

In the award-winning book Trumpet, a story about a jazz musician who lived his life as a man despite being born a girl, Jackie Kay drives both her characters and the reader into questioning some widely-accepted norms, including the correlation between biological sex and culturally-determined gender roles. The defiance of this conception is explicitly demonstrated via the novel’s elaboration on the process in which Joss Moody manages not only to deconstruct but also to reconstruct his gender identity and Millie’s conviction in Joss’s masculinity.
During the course of the narrative, Joss goes against the conventional patterns to convert his gender as a woman into a man, which appears to be his goal throughout his life. Joss estranges from his prearranged identity as a woman, deeming and defining himself as a man, and living in accordance with the standards of a man. Indeed, Joss is so resolute in his …show more content…
In the article The Truth is a Thorny Issue: Lesbian Denial in Jackie Kay’s Trumpet by Ceri Davies, the author claims that “Millie’s search for truth is undermined by the fact that her life is built upon Joss’s lie, but Millie tries not to confront this”. On the contrary, Millie has no truth to seek, nor is her life constructed out of Joss’s lie. For Millie, her husband’s masculinity is never in doubt. Their intense passion is illustrated through Millie's embracement of Joss and all that belongs to him from the beginning. Although only after she falls in love with Joss does she learn the “truth” about him, this fails to change anything for her either when he is alive or after his death: “[Millie looks] at the picture on the album cover, but no matter how hard [she tries], [she] can’t see him as anything other than him, [her] Joss, [her] husband.” (35) Throughout the novel, such statements repeatedly occur on Millie’s