Queering the Gender Binary. American Trans-Themed YA Literature and Its Translation into Italian

After experiencing a long-lasting erasure, transgender identities have lately become a core issue in the political and cultural debates of many Western societies (Stryker 2017). For this reason, the present contribution focuses on trans visibility in YA literature between the US and Italy. First, it maps out the evolution of American trans-themed novels and explains how the Italian publishing has reacted to them. Second, it presents two case studies to discuss the main ethical and professional challenges in translating books which feature trans protagonists and gender-neutral language. In the first case study, the paper analyzes the strategies found in the Italian translation of the novel Cemetery Boys (Thomas 2020). Later, it focuses on a book which has not been translated into Italian yet, i.e., Gender Queer (Kobabe 2019a). In doing so, the contribution demonstrates that the translation of these texts implies navigating through innovation and linguistic compromise. In conclusion, it argues that, thanks to translation, teen readers can discover new possibility models, which are vital resources to understand themselves and the complex society they live in.