Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl’s Confabulous Memoir is a fictional account of an unnamed trans girl’s journey to find community and to learn to love herself. Written by Kai Cheng Thom and published in 2016, the work is a fictional coming-of-age memoir. The fictional narrator’s experience in some ways closely mirrors that of the author herself, though the novel translates these experiences into a magical world. Thom is a trans woman author from Canada, the child of Asian immigrants, a public speaker, and a former social worker. Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars is her first book, and it explores themes such as Magic as a Window to the Unconscious, Communal Resilience and Resistance, and Storytelling as a Means of Identity Building. The text integrates elements of many genres, from poetry, to letters, to magical realism, to reimagine what a transgender memoir can be. Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Fiction at the 29th Lambda Literary Awards. In 2019, actress Emma Watson selected the book for Our Shared Shelf, her online book club.

This guide uses the first edition of the novel, published by Metonymy Press in 2016.

Content Warning: Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars includes references to and depictions of anti-trans bias and anti-trans violence, sexual assault/abuse, addiction, self-harm, and death.

Plot Summary

Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars opens with the narrator, who remains unnamed for the entirety of the narrative, sitting in her boyfriend’s apartment watching another trans woman accept a humanitarian award on television. The narrator is frustrated by the way this trans woman’s story has been packaged as safe and palatable for television audiences, and she feels emboldened to tell an alternative one. In her anger, she blows a kiss at the TV, and it shatters.

The narrator then starts to share her backstory. She grew up in the aptly named seaside town of Gloom and was assigned male at birth. Her parents, immigrants from China, placed their hopes and dreams in the narrator, leading them to control her entire life. The narrator grows frustrated with the limitations placed on her, as well as her inability to live her life as a girl, so she decides to leave home and make her way to the mythical City of Smoke and Lights. She must leave her younger sister, Charity, behind, and Charity is crushed. The narrator assures Charity that she will write to her. She then boards a bus bound for the City in order to start her new life. Her journey there is not easy, and she must defend herself from the advances of a fellow passenger. Eventually, she disembarks in the City and finds that it is everything she hoped it would be.

The narrator quickly finds a trans community in the City of Smoke and Lights, thanks to her immediate friendship with Kimaya, a trans woman who offers to help the narrator the moment she gets off the bus. Kimaya brings the narrator to the Street of Miracles, a magical pleasure district where the trans women live and work. There she meets other trans women, including Rapunzelle, who is Kimaya’s lover, as well as Valaria, Lucretia, Alzena the Witch, and many more. With Kimaya’s initial support, the narrator is able to secure a modest place to live, and she begins to integrate into her new community. Despite finding a place that feels like home, the narrator still encounters difficulties. She starts taking hormones to aid in her transition, but she must get them from a strange, less than reputable clinic run by the disconcerting Dr. Crocodile. The narrator is also still grappling with the residual trauma from her childhood in Gloom, and she worries about the people she left behind, especially her sister. As promised, she writes to Charity as often as she can.

A turning point arrives when The Street of Miracles is devastated by the murder of a young trans woman named Soraya. She was a sex worker and was likely killed by one of her clients. Her death divides the trans community, with some of the women seeking justice and retribution while others, like Kimaya, urge them all to remain calm and support one another. The leader of the faction urging vengeance is Valaria, often referred to as the Goddess of War. She believes that times have changed and the trans women can no longer wait patiently for justice to come to them. Valaria successfully convinces many of the women to join her cause, including the narrator and Rapunzelle, much to Kimaya’s dismay. Their faction forms a vigilante group dubbed the Lipstick Lacerators. They begin to stalk the streets surrounding the Street of Miracles, the ones frequented by the bar patrons and clients who abuse trans women. They attack the cisgender men they encounter, cultivating fear and hysteria throughout the city. They gain such notoriety that a group of professors and students from the local university invite them to campus for an interview. While she is there, the narrator meets one of the students, a trans man named Josh, and is immediately attracted to him.

Eventually, the adventures of the narrator and her fellow Lipstick Lacerators come to an unfortunate end when they find themselves the subject of a sting operation. One of their marks reveals himself as an undercover police officer, and before they realize it, the trans women are completely surrounded. They scatter in all directions, attempting to escape, with some getting injured in the process. The narrator hides in a mysterious courtyard with a fountain in the center. While she is hiding, another member of the Lipstick Lacerators, the beautiful and arrogant Lucretia, is violently dragged into the courtyard by a police officer. Lucretia is attempting to resist and get away, which prompts the officer to reach for his gun. The narrator jumps out and strikes the officer in the back of the head. He falls against the side of the fountain and dies. The narrator panics about getting arrested and going to jail. Meanwhile, the fountain begins to come to life. The vines wrapped around it move on their own, encircling the body of the police officer and revealing a statue at the center of the fountain. Lucretia declares that it is a statue of the First Femme, who died to protect the Street of Miracles. The police officer’s body is dragged deep into the well of the fountain and is never seen again.

In the aftermath of the incident with the police, the narrator still feels fearful and hopeless. Valaria also decides to leave the Street of Miracles and lay low to avoid bringing further unwanted attention to the Street. Kimaya is also refusing to speak to or even see Rapunzelle. The community is fractured and in pain. Kimaya then suggests that they hold an open mic night, allowing all the trans women to come together to heal and share their stories. Most of the community attends, and nearly everyone has an opportunity to perform, even the narrator. She does not feel completely healed after this experience, however, and she seeks out Alzena the Witch for advice. Alzena tells the narrator that she must use sweetness, rather than violence or hard heartedness, to resolve her problem. The narrator takes Alzena’s advice to heart and decides to bake a cake. Her “forgiveness” cake is so sweet and so powerful that it not only heals the sorrow in the narrator’s heart, but also allows the other characters, such as Kimaya, Valaria, and her sister, to grow and forgive themselves.

The narrator receives a phone call from Josh, the student from the university, checking up on her in the wake of police incident. He asks the narrator out on a date and she agrees. Though she is nervous leading up to the event, she decides to go through with it. Josh picks her up in his car and takes her to a cemetery, where he has laid out a romantic picnic by his family’s mausoleum. The narrator is impressed and enamored. The two have a sexual encounter, and the narrator realizes that Josh is the first boy who has ever given her an orgasm.

Josh and the narrator’s relationship progresses quickly. He invites her to move into his apartment in the City of Smoke and Lights. He also introduces the narrator to his parents, who seem open-minded, though his mother frequently looks at the narrator with apparent discomfort. Josh advocates for the narrator throughout the meal, which the narrator both appreciates and finds condescending. On the day of the move, while the narrator is packing, Kimaya reminds her that she doesn’t have to do anything that she doesn’t want to do. She is the writer of her own story.

The narrative then circles back to the opening scene, in which the narrator is in her boyfriend’s apartment. She reveals that the boyfriend in question is Josh and that she is struggling to make herself at home in his luxury apartment. She decides that, even though this is the life she feels she should want, it is not the life for her. The narrator decides to leave, writing Josh a note of appreciation and thanks. She explains to the reader that she needs to continue to grow and find new ways to love herself. Only then will she be able to come back and share that love with others.