The three works in this chapter all represent acts of cross-gender identification, or at least inscription, on the part of the author. Anthony Godby Johnson's memoir A Rock and a Hard Place was published in 1993 as the work of a teenage boy whose parents had allowed the abuse that resulted in his developing AIDS; however, it was, rather, written by an entirely healthy middle-aged woman. The other two examples were published as fiction. Rahila Khan's short stories about the lives of working-class Asian girls and white boys were published in 1987 as Down the Road, Worlds Away, ostensibly by a woman born in Coventry whose name suggested that she was of Pakistani Muslim origin; Toby Forward, a white vicar, eventually admitted to being the real author. J. T. LeRoy's fiction, particularly her 2000 novel Sarah, purported to be based on the life of its author, a gender dysmorphic former male prostitute, but was in fact written by Laura Albert, a musician living in San Francisco with her husband and son.

These examples are embodiments of what Michel Foucault has called the ‘author-function’, since in each case the text did indeed point to a ‘figure’ that ‘is outside it and antecedes it’, in his description of the typical authorial function, only to reveal the misleading nature of such an attribution. This embodiment took varied forms: although Khan existed only as a name that was abandoned before any proof of her identity was required, Tony Godby Johnson was represented by a photograph and a voice on the telephone, while in the case of LeRoy the authorial persona was literally acted out. Gender deception is integral to the author-function constructed in each of the three cases analysed here, but it invariably acts for another purpose. In Rahila Khan's case, the implication of an autobiographical basis for those of her stories about Muslim girls was crucial as legitimising the apparently extreme contrast such a viewpoint offered with those about white boys, as part of a plea for cultural tolerance; while the fate of Tony Johnson and J. T. LeRoy, as male victims of sexual abuse and, in the latter's case, as a former sex worker, made their stories unusual and appealing.