Helcome to St Hell

 
Welcome to St Hell
My Trans Teen Misadventure
by Lewis Hancox

Graphix
2022

 

 

Welcome to St Hell is a graphic memoir by a British trans guy, covering his teen years, as he shifted from thinking of himself as a tomboy, then a lesbian, and finally as a man. Hancox is from a working-class community in northern England (St Helens, aka St Hell,) and both his narration and the dialogue is written in the local vernacular.

 
Present-day Hancox inserts himself in the narrative, to point out times he wishes he'd been kinder to himself, and to interview the present-day versions of his family and friends about what they now think of some of the events depicted. His choice to tell the story in this way feels unique among the memoirs I've seen.

 
Hancox is only a couple years younger than me, and seems to have been grappling with his feelings about his gender around the same time I was, both in terms of stage-of-life and in terms of the calendar year.
Hancox's friends and family were basically supportive from the start (though they felt some initial confusion and reticence too) - most of his struggles are with his own feelings, and with not really knowing that what he feels has a name and is a viable path through life. Living in the same early-internet era, I also had to figure out how my teenage sense that 'I wish I could be a girl' could be translated into a fulfilling life as an adult woman.

 
In telling his own story, I think Hancox gets at some relatively universal feelings of being trapped in a small town where you don't know how to live the sort of life you want, of trying to figure out who you want to be as a person, of worrying about whether the people who knew you when you were young will still accept you as you change into an adult.