Trumpet

Having chosen a different identity than the one assigned to him at birth, Joss retains it with great care. After his death, the revelation of his decision upends public perception of him—as discussion of same-sex relationships and transgender individuals were not commonplace at the time. In general, the public is shocked by Joss’s secret. Aside from this uproar, Jackie Kay weaves accounts of other characters who deal with shifting identities or struggle to decide who they are. Symbolically, Kay illustrates this by having many characters undergo or consider name changes (such as Joss and Colman).

For some characters, the question of identity relates to sexual orientation. Millie felt attracted to Joss when she assumed him to be a cisgender man, and continued to love him upon discovering Joss’s assigned gender. May Hart, Josephine’s childhood playmate—now in her 70s—looks at a photograph of Joss and perceives him as a woman. This immediately reignites her sexual attraction to him, even after many relationships with cisgender men.

There are also characters wrestling with who they are socially, vocationally, and morally. This idea is best represented by Maggie, the Moodys’ former housekeeper, describing Millie’s Russian nesting dolls. Millie had equated the dolls to people: “We’re all like that, aren’t we? We’ve all got lots of little people inside us” (173).