Jackie Kay created a point of controversy regarding gender identity in the novel Trumpet. Through Joss Moody and Millie Moody's different perspectives on gender, the novel challenges the absoluteness of one's identity by demonstrating the inability of language to express it. Kay thus achieves another way of representing identity through a more universal medium: music. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay It's understandable that Joss and Millie's gender seems indefinable considering their circumstances. Joss Moody was a girl, until her passion for jazz led her to pretend to be a man; as time goes by, he gets so used to being a man that he forgets his original identity - woman - and thus gets another identity - man. In that identity he meets and falls in love with Millie, a woman who always considers him a man despite his female body. Their relationship is so complicated that no existing sexual category can describe it. For most people, including Sophie Stone in the novel and Ceri Davies in "The Truth is a Tricky Question: Lesbian Denial", the couple are simply lesbians trying to deny their sexuality by creating an unreal heterosexual family." Lesbians who [adopt] a child; one playing mother, the other playing father” (Kay, 170); “Millie must reject the term 'lesbian' because it suggests the otherness rather than the normality she wants her life to project” (Davies, 12). In this sense, gender aligns with the body, and therefore, no matter what couples do, they can never escape their bodily sex. However, it is important to remember that, as in “The Power of the Ordinary Subversive in Jackie Kay's Trumpet” written by Tracy Hargreaves* “anatomically differentiated bodies need not… be the guarantee of heterosexuality” (3, 4)**. Gender is partly a person's identity; therefore it cannot be defined simply through materiality, but rather through other factors such as self-definition, environment... The relationship between Joss and Millie can only be defined as lesbian if they both consider themselves women. However, to Millie they are still husband and wife. “I can't see him as anything other than him, my Joss, my husband” (Kay, 35). Since husband-wife indicates heterosexuality, Millie Moody's insistence on this term demonstrates that Joss is a man – at least in the relationship. Furthermore, since gender is displayed through behavior, Joss's behavior in her most private life demonstrates that her gender is male. However, can he completely be a man, considering the fact that he was a girl and not deny that identity? ? Instead of completely eliminating the female gender, it is possible that Joss developed multiple gender identities within herself. You can clearly see how Joss regards Josephine – his female version – as a third person: “[he] always talks about her in the third person. She [is] his third person” (Kay, 93). In doing so, he created a new genre that is analogous to Virginia Woolf's “androgynous mind,” a mind that is both male and female, or as Hargreaves writes, “a celebration of the location, within oneself, of the presence of both.” sexes, recognition of sexual plurality” (13). Such a complex identity cannot be condemned into a limited range of definitions created by cultural standards. If language cannot express one's identity, then identity should be expressed through more universal means, as in the novel Music. In music no genre or self is necessary: ​​"His whole self collapses: his idiosyncrasies, his personality, his ego, his