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Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl is a cross-over novel Not only in the sense that its protagonist, Paul, shifts continually between sexes and genders depending on what he considers the most exciting, or expedient But also in that Lawlor originally published the book in 2017 via an independent outlet, Rescue Press Its popularity with critics and readers alike has led a larger publisher, Vintage, to reissue it in Lawlor’s native United States, and Picador to publish it in the United Kingdom Together with Confessions of the Fox, which – written by Lawlor’s friend Jordy Rosenberg – reimagines the eighteenth-century English thief, jailbreaker and folk hero Jack Sheppard as a trans man – it has become one of the first novels by a trans or non-binary author to move outside smaller presses Does this mark the point when fiction by and about (if not exclusively for) trans and non-binary people – a genre that has not existed for very long, but which draws on a long line of autobiographical and theoretical writing – breaks into the literary mainstream? Might bringing such trans and non-binary perspectives and discourses to an audience help to change the way in which authors more widely think about gender?   Like Confessions of the Fox, Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl is set in the past Lawlor’s is a recent past, though, and one in which trans authors were still finding their voices: the early 1990s In an influential text first published in 1987, The Empire Strikes Back: A Post-Transsexual Manifesto, trans theorist and artist Sandy Stone argued that since Lili Elbe’s Man into Woman was published in 1933, transition memoirs had failed to adequately explore the physical, psychological or social space in between ‘male’ and ‘female’ In this void, Stone argued, transphobic feminists have been able to dominate the narrative about transsexual people’s conceptions of gender expression and motives for transitioning, and the medical and social structures through which trans identities were constituted In response, Stone asked trans and non-binary authors to write not just more honestly but also more inventively about their experiences