The Sterotypical Trans Narrative

10,000 Dresses, written by Marcus Ewert and illustrated by Rex Ray attempts to share a story of a trans girl growing up. Unfortunately, in doing so, Marcus brings out the most aggressive stereotyping possible through overemphasis of dresses, focusing on the bullies and heroic action by one.

The book starts off strong, right off the bat hitting you with Bailey’s love of dresses, the trans women stereotype, and how many different types of dresses she dreams about. All that this does is reinforce the fact that trans women have to be hyperfeminine and strengthens gender norms.

Moreover, the plot is driven forward only by the transphobes spurring Bailey to do something, be that running away back to home, or in the end, running away to someone else, showing trans girls having the inability to help themselves and relying on other people to defend themselves. It pressures people towards only looking for help rather than being the help they need in themselves.

Additionally, there was only one person who did anything in support of Bailey, Laurel, and all they did was make dresses with her. Bailey’s entire family (mother, then father, then brother) being transphobic towards her, and this never being resolved, just feeds into frightening young trans people away from coming out. All it does is make people think that only very few people would treat them well if they come out.

The illustrations only have white, straight people, which is a small blemish, but somewhat normal if no one is paying attention, which it seems like they didn’t here. At least there were no token characters, but in place of that there’s no one who is a POC or LGBTQ+ (although perhaps having negative sentiment against POC/LGBTQ+ people wouldn’t be a good idea).

The cherry on top of this picture book is that both the writer and the illustrator both are cis men. They can’t know what struggles that someone who’s trans would run into, and through what they have produced here they have only the smallest view into what being trans is. The massive stereotyping in this entire book isn’t even showing someone’s real life, which would be the only excuse for being this stereotypical. Furthermore, when Bailey doesn’t even attempt to help herself, perhaps this is from some bias to want everyone to have to be helped by them?

Not only is it a bad book in terms of its teaching, but it’s also just a bad book in general. The book is incredibly repetitive, repeating the same basic section about being a boy therefore they can’t wear dress and a dream section about imagining a dress three times, and then concludes just as quickly as it started with a three page ending where Laurel makes dresses with Bailey, and no part of the transphobia which just elapsed was resolved.