A Natural History of Transition

by Callum Angus

A Natural History of Transition is a collection of short stories that disrupts the notion that trans people can only have one transformation. Like the landscape studied over eons, change does not have an expiration date for these trans characters, who grow as tall as buildings, turn into mountains, unravel hometown mysteries, and give birth to cocoons. Portland-based author Callum Angus infuses his work with a mix of alternative history, horror, and a reality heavily dosed with magic.

Genres: Short Stories, Queer, Fiction, LGBT, Transgender, Horror, Fantasy

200 pages, Paperback

First published April 27, 2021

About the author

Callum Angus is a trans writer and editor living in Portland, Oregon. He is the author of A Natural History of Transition (Metonymy Press). His work has appeared in Orion, Catapult, LA Review of Books, Nat. Brut, The Common, and elsewhere. A former bookseller at Powell's and the Odyssey Bookshop in South Hadley, MA, he holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He edits the literary journal smoke and mold.

Reviews

[CaseyTheCanadianLesbrarian · Rating 5 out of 5]

What an extraordinary collection of short stories. Callum Angus takes the overdone and/or exoticized theme of transition for trans characters and in each of these speculative stories creates something unique, surprising, and thought-provoking.

All of the stories went in a direction I didn't expect. They blend keen observations on contemporary life with fabulist, magical elements. They also felt very grounded in the natural world.

In one story where everyone chooses their gender at age 11, a character changes their mind after the initial decision, and then decides that a simple gender transition is not enough--they would like to be a rock. And then, perhaps something else...

In another, a trans guy living in a future dystopia returns to his hometown to find its inhabitants mutating into something horrifying and strange.

A story about a pregnant trans guy whose 'baby' comes out a cocoon also really resonated with me, as I am currently pregnant.

I loved this! Highly recommended.

[Erik · Rating 5 out of 5]

Callum Angus' debut collection of short stories, A Natural History of Transition is a beautiful, magical journey through gender and change.

Each story in Angus' collection follows someone confronted with gender transition - a young woman who transition and then re-transitions only to transition again, a young girl named Rob, not Robyn, and more. Blending emotional, humanistic tales with magical realism, Angus teaches his readers to normalize gender transition and appreciate the nuances of human identity.

Normally not a fan of short story collection, I was hesitant to read this one, but Angus' writing is unique and beautiful and I read this book in a day. A Natural History of Transition will teach you so much about yourself and your own relationship to gender and transition; it's just that good.

[Megan · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a cohesive collection invested in expanding how we think about "transition," this book reminded me conceptually of Tom Cho's Look Who's Morphing, though it's grounded in a much more naturalistic world--not unlike the world of Oliver Baez Bendorf's The Spectral Wilderness. Lucky me, those are two of my favorite books, and this one, I suspect, will be joining those ranks. I love the combination of bona fide trans characters with fabulist/fabulous transformations (becoming stone, becoming swarm, becoming chrysalis)--transness operating on both realistic and fantastic levels, with a deep commitment to recognizing the transformative magic of the natural world. Also a deep interest in odd museums and object collections--queer curations of the changing world. Highlights for me: "Winter of Men," which imagines a seventeenth-century congregation of nuns whose bodies transition six months out of the year; "Archipelagos," about a trailer-park boy and his caterpillar; and the last long title story, in which a trans guy goes home to check out the strange museum his uncle has bequeathed to him.

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Exceptionally good stuff. Fans of Rikki Ducornet or John Keene etc should absolutely get hold of this asap, as should anyone interested in hearing trans voices (which, to be honest, should be all of you). Subtle, strange and beautifully ambiguous writing.

[James · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am reluctantly giving this book three stars. Many of the stories were moving and thought-provoking, but the ones that weren't left me utterly cold. For example, whereas 'In Kind' is one of the best-written articulations of transmasculinity I have ever read, 'Winter of Men' felt like a swing and a miss, attempting to articulate a fantastical/historical trans lineage without giving more than a passing nod to the early modern setting, and 'A Natural History of Transition' felt like a very odd note on which to end the collection, out of step with the other content.

[Frankie · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars? I just don’t love the short story collection, and beyond that, I didn’t like many of these short stories. I like archipelagos, and I liked a natural history of transition, but it did freak me out a little.

[Sammy Kutsch · Rating 3 out of 5]

A lot of these were odd and I don’t think I quite got what was going on. Overall not a bad reading experience I just left kinda going ‘huh’ and that was it.

[jess! · Rating 4 out of 5]

i love trans lit, i love magical realism, i loved this collection <3

[Laura Sackton · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wrote a bit more about this book here: https://booksandbakes.substack.com/p/...

Absolutely magical. Every one of these stories surprised me. I went int each one expecting something, based on the first paragraph, or the characters, or my own expectations, maybe, and each time I got something completely different. There is so much movement in them. And they are also so gleefully queer and trans. I don't know how to explain it, really. There is one story, "The Swarm" which is about a character who is a swarm of insects. It's very short. It's the sort of story I usually don't like, feel like I can't really access. It may have been my favorite one in the whole collection. It was like Angus took a particular queer feeling, a feeling of being a particular way in the world, and made it into a story. It felt like home. And like something unknown. And I'm sure that trans readers of this collection will have a different experience of it than me, a cis queer person reading it. Angus just creates so much space for nuance and magic in these pages and characters. There are so many possible stories within each story. There are no absolutes.

It's a book about all the in-between places, the blurry lines, the transitions that become transformations that become journeys that become questions. So many of the stories are also open-ended and full of beginnings. It's often something I don't like about short stories, because it feels unsatisfying to read. Not so here. Reading each one felt like jumping off a cliff and discovering a different kind of magic.

Loved this with my whole heart. Weird and unsettling and gorgeous and warm and curious. I also loved how deeply rooted in nature and place many of these stories are. It's something that still isn't super common in queer lit. The characters here are bugs and rocks and mountains. Many of them have a sense of deep connection with landscape in all its messiness. It's so refreshing and magical to read. Highly recommend.

[felix · Rating 5 out of 5]

i already want to reread this

[Mat · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5* short stories are not for me but I keep trying to find a collection that will be and this was one of my favorites.

There were a couple stories in here I LOVED but the rest I honestly just did not understand.. and to be honest that’s probably more on me and my ability to read analytically and understand subtext than the actual stories themselves lol

[Wilma (Enby Reads) · Rating 4 out of 5]

[4.25]

[Jonathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really liked the ideas and energy of these stories. The longer ones sometimes did not satisfy me, but overall this was a delightful book, especially "In Kind" and "Rock Jenny."

4/5

[adrien · Rating 4 out of 5]

wow. i am wowed.

first, i would like to tell rory (because i know youll read this) that this book was so on the nose for me its a little scary. i dont think i would have found it on my own for a long time so seriously i really really thank you for gifting it to me. thank you so so much.

a recurring thought i had throughout this was, how does callum anges even come up with this stuff?

the stories' bizarre mix of reality and fantasy elements, (a genre i thought i didnt enjoy anymore) along with anges' descriptions have me reeling. when i think back to a point in the book, i just imagine the imagery in my head, like it was a memory.

something about this book is that i feel like every emotion or feel the author wanted to convey was executed perfectly. the nostalgic and wonder of jenny? yep. the small-town horror of the last story? it literally gave me chills.

i think overall my favorite was winter of men. you cant really get much cooler (?) than seasonally transgender nuns who arent really nuns, and that leads me to think of how each story left me wanting more, the end just a little too up to interpretation and honestly i will be re-reading just to try and figure it out a little more. once again. wow.

the only critique i have of this book is i would have liked to see more types of transgender people! wheres the trans girls' mountain range and her small town mystery! but honestly i cant blame the author as he is transmasculine and is writing from his own experiences! so just a thought!

overall, amazing book i will be rereading again! thank you very much aminah!

[lyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

that is how you write short stories !!!!!

[Flick · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was mostly a cover-buy (I say that but I didn’t even purchase it, that honour goes to my partner who got it before I could even express an interest) and it’s one that I don’t regret. The stories inside are as beautiful as the outside, each well-executed and emphasising the mutable nature of “civilised” humanity and the wilderness of nature. We are often told that these two things are mutually exclusive – man’s dominion over nature proves the rule of “unnatural” technology – yet Angus’ stories show that humans are the very canvas on which nature enacts her desires. There is nothing to truly differentiate flesh from stone, from shiny beetle carapace, from the worms of the earth to the stars of the heavens. We are all one and the same, and nothing is truly “unnatural” in the end.

I think there is a tendency among trans creators to really embrace the idea of transition as something both natural and unnatural, a willingness to live in the weird limbo that exists in-between nature and artifice. In A Natural History of Transition, Angus strips away the artifice to expose the strangeness of the nature underneath. There is no performance to the transitions that take place in these stories, they are merely the many different stages of Being, the many ways of interacting with the world and each other.

I thoroughly enjoyed all the stories in this collection, which is something I’ve been doing a lot more recently. I have written before about how I often find it difficult to maintain interest in a collection of stories, because it is simply so easy to put the book down after a bite-sized chunk of writing and then just… not pick it up again. I think it’s the nature of short stories that they get to be read in their entirety and at different times, but in the end they still create a whole. I think it is a mark of a good collection (by one author) that the stories can be read separately while still maintaining a sense of cohesion. A Natural History of Transition manages to hold itself together perfectly, while still showcasing a wide variety of writing styles and content. The idea of a transition-as-nature is strongly emphasised in each story, resulting in a series of dialectical works examining the same idea from a variety of viewpoints, as if the crystalline vision of “nature” and “transition” have been held to the light and we get to enjoy the many facets and refractions of colour that are made as it twists and turns. Each story is able to exist in its entirety, but as part of a whole they become something more.

My favourite stories from this collection are “In Kind” – where Nathan goes through a queer pregnancy with the help of his estranged mother who is carrying her own small growth – “Rock Jenny” – where Jenny transitions and de-transitions, grows and shrinks like a snake shedding its skin – “Winter of Men” – A sect of nuns in the freshly colonised America change their primary sex characteristics with the seasons (this is probably the one that appealed to my imagination the most and has me considering writing my own weird nun story) – “Archipelagos” – Monty collects leaves and rocks and insects and finally goes on his own expedition on a secret ocean – and “The Swarm”, which I don’t know how to properly talk about without spoiling it, except to say that it’s about a sentient swarm of insects. Each of these stories is about more than one thing at once, in a winding complexity that I relish in stories both long and short. While I enjoyed the collection as a whole, and certainly didn’t dislike the stories I haven’t mentioned, I felt that these particular tales appealed to my emotions and generated more personal inspiration than the others.

A Natural History of Transition celebrates the joy and complexity of transition in a way that I haven’t really experienced before. In a world where such things are toted as “unnatural”, Angus reminds us that there is, in fact, nothing more natural than the unfolding of the self in order to become.

Find this review and more at my website StrangeQueerThings

[virgorising · Rating 5 out of 5]

short fiction isn't my usual fare but i enjoyed this a lot! i'll be thinking about these stories for a while—my inexpert feeling is that they are meant to be metabolized over time, connections and theories emerging as the sediment of thought builds new forms, new meanings. reading this made me wish i was still an academic and could discuss it in seminar, or assign its stories to my tutorial sections. the prose is clean, smart, surprising, and compulsively readable; the stories' reflections on natural history, their commitment to unsettling or denaturalizing the naturalistic fantasy, and their attention to their own colonial implications feel very fresh to me, and very much in conversation with the kind of work i barely scraped the surface of in grad school. chewy and thought-provoking with persistently lovely turns of phrase and a really marvellous specificity—the descriptions of bugs and formations and geological events reminded me of the science-writing in REAL LIFE. (maybe i'm just showing the narrowness of my reading in this kind of area. regardless: it was good.)

[Cass · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm sad about how disappointing this was- I've had it on my shelf for a while waiting for the right moment and it didn't really deliver for me. The prose was quite simplistic and I don't think the content made up for that, quite cliché-laden (which is impressive for how out-there some of the concepts were) and it didn't really make sense to me as a whole collection. A couple of the stories were very enjoyable though! My favourites were rock Jenny, in kind and a natural history of transition

[lou · Rating 4 out of 5]

got this from the library and devoured it in one day. angus's prose is stunning— decisive and beautiful. the stories themselves are inventive and fascinating. this is the kind of book that makes me want to write.

[Streettwanderer · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of my first successful forays into magical realism. Loved a few and like a few. Couldn’t connect with one. Each was like its own weird circus of a dreamworld. Finishing this on New Year’s Day was a fun way to start what’s sure to be a weird AF year.

[Renée · Rating 3 out of 5]

My favorite story from this collection was “Archipelagos”.

[:3 · Rating 5 out of 5]

was completely different than expected, but i loved every bit of it. the first story hit the hardest for me!

[spoon]

DNF/BR (7/28/25) - needed a bunch of words deleted to create effect; i was pushing through until the reference to the gold/white // blue/black dress - no.

wanted to like this!!!

[Fiona · Rating 3 out of 5]

Book club. Liked some of them! The last one has a great line about doing whippits in a parking lot

[chris Meadowcroft · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sooooo good!! Turn me into a rock

[Jay · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not sure if i have the words to adequately express how i feel about this book. Doesn’t really make sense to me as a collection, a lot of the stories were bizarre and left me confused. I liked the last 2 stories though, the creepiness had me intrigued. The rest of them just left me thinking „huh?“

[Barry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredible, and genuinely novel, stories on the theme of transition.

[Zoë · Rating 5 out of 5]

wooooo mama! very fun creepy loving sad

[Loriepaddock · Rating 5 out of 5]

So interesting. Change is a part of life and transitions are part of the process. A memorable read.

[Rach · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful, bizarre and captivating. These stories reimagine transness in a surreal and magical way. Angus encourages the reader to examine what it really means to exist inside a body, and to realize the potential for transformation and change that is possible within us all.