#Reading books by women and people of color and women of color and trans authors and trans women authors of color
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there's a troubling tendency in feminist spaces to rehabilitate radical feminist theory. this isn't surprising coming from actual radfems, most notably terfs, but this tendency exists even among trans people - most often tme (transmisogyny-exempt) trans people, but also occasionally among tma (transmisogyny-affected) trans people as well.
I fail to see the need to use feminist thought put forth by, for example, adrienne rich or andrea dworkin, as the foundation for further theory. both of these authors, while very influential, both contributed to or supported janice raymond's book, "the transsexual empire", in which she infamously asserted, without exaggeration, that trans women's passive existence constitutes an act of rape.
as a disclaimer, I have not directly read any of the three authors that I named above, as the research I've done about them indicates that reading their extended works would be psychologically harmful to me as a trans woman. I have tried to learn as much as I can about their beliefs and worldviews, but I admit it is possible that I may be misrepresenting them at some points. regardless, this post is not specifically about them anyway. unless I name them, this post is about general trends I've noticed in feminist circles.
now, whether or not a given radical feminist author claims to be trans-inclusive is ultimately meaningless, as radical feminism inherently relies on biological essentialism as its explanation for the oppression of women by men. if simply being born with a penis means that one is biologically predisposed to perpetrate acts of gendered violence, including rape, then what does it mean to be "trans-inclusive" with this worldview? most often, the answer that I find to this question among radical feminists is that they only support people on the transmasculine spectrum, while still essentializing them as women who transition to escape the oppressive forces of misogyny.
I dislike this perspective for many reasons. most obviously, I believe it's blatantly transphobic to reduce transmasculine people to their assigned gender at birth, even while paying them lip service by using the correct pronouns for them. but moreover, I find that it's predicated on largely white and tme perspectives on femininity.
perhaps femininity may seem innately traumatizing for white people who were afab. after all, it's essentially forced upon them from the moment of birth. but this experience is not universal. women of color, most especially black women, are routinely and systematically denied femininity in a violent act of degendering that seeks to protect the gender binary, which itself is a white supremacist, colonialist invention. however, for the aforementioned women of color, reclaiming the femininity they've been denied and making it something all their own can be highly empowering.
I find it ironic that adrienne rich, for example, is cited in feminist circles that uphold (whether knowingly or not) this radical feminist belief, as she was quite vocal about how her perspectives were taken more seriously than her black counterparts due to her white privilege. yet, the feminists today who parrot the beliefs of her and her white contemporaries largely ignore the perspectives of nonwhite, and especially tma feminists.
my previous paragraph about femininity is not new information; it has been written about extensively by feminists of color - tme and tma alike. and yet, there is very little discussion of these works in white- and tme-dominated feminist spaces. yes, we've all heard praises of leslie feinberg's "stone butch blues", but where are the quoted passages from, for example, "women, race, & class" by angela davis, or "decolonizing trans/gender 101" by b. binaohan?
in case I haven't made it clear, I, as a white trans woman, am more than happy to read works written by tme feminists. however, far too often, I find that the writings of tme feminists that are most widely circulated represent a very narrow understanding of feminism, mostly feminism put forth by white radical feminists and their allies in the 20th century. these perspectives very frequently leave behind, and often outright exclude, people of color and transfeminine people, whose struggles are inherently linked. not only are many people of color transfeminine and vice versa, even the mechanisms which are used to deny tme women of color femininity are also used against trans women - julia serano, a white trans feminist, says this in her book, "whipping girl"!
attempting to rehabilitate radical feminist thought, even the kind put forth by feminists who claimed to be allies of people of color and colonized peoples, seems futile to me when those same feminists gave janice raymond their full support in writing one of the most violently transmisogynistic works in the feminist sphere. personally, I have no faith in people who find transmisogyny anything other than absolutely abhorrent to say anything meaningful about women's liberation. the fact is, when the only feminism that receives widespread discussion is the kind written by these people, then women of color, trans women, and ESPECIALLY trans women of color will continue to suffer under a white supremacist, transmisogynistic, colonial regime.
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ftmtftm's reading (and watching) list
So I've been putting this list together to help people understand my beliefs and also to expand their own. This is a list of theorists, poets, authors, artists, and people that I often source from whose works have deeply impacted my framework of the world. I hope someone else can find them useful as well.
I've included several videos because I know how inaccessible academic text can be, but I do encourage you to read the text if you're able and seek out copies of books listed at your local libraries or independent book sellers/second hand book shops! When I could not find a PDF for a written work I have added Thrift Books links. Also double check the Internet Archive, Trans Reads, and The Anarchist Library for more readings!!
If any of these links break please let me know and I'll see what I can do to fix them. I'll be adding to this list as time goes on as currently these are just the books I can see on my bookshelf and videos I could remember I've seen before!
3.4.2024 - This list is slightly outdated in that there are several authors and works I need to add. Please seach the names James Baldwin and Audre Lorde or simply my reading list tag on my blog for additional resources.
Theory
Kimberlé Crenshaw:
Critial Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed The Movement - thrift books
Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color - PDF
The Urgency of Intersectionality - video
Kimberlé Crenshaw Intersectionality is NOT identity - video exerpt from her WOW keynote speech
Angela Davis:
Angela Davis Criticizes "Mainstream Feminism" / Bourgeois Feminism - video
Angela Davis What it means to be a Revolutionary (1972 Interview) - video
Roxane Gay:
Bad Feminist: Essays - Internet Archive
Roxane Gay: Confessions of a bad feminist - video
Roxane Gay, Feminism and Difficult Women - video
bell hooks:
Feminism is for Everybody - PDF
The Will to Change - Internet Archive / audio book - YouTube
All About Love - PDF / audio book - YouTube
Teaching to Transgress PDF / audio book - YouTube
Speaking Freely: bell hooks - video
bell hooks & john a. powell: Belonging Through Connection (Othering & Belonging Conference 2015) - video
bell hooks & Gloria Steinem at Eugene Lang College - video (intro ends 7:24)
Emi Koyama:
The Transfeminist Manifesto - PDF
Ijeoma Oluo:
So You Want to Talk About Race - thrift books
Ijeoma Oluo Talks at Google - video
Public Presentation with Ijeoma Olua - video
History / Journals
P. Carl:
Becoming a Man - thrift books
Library Labyrinth Live Presents: P. Carl Becoming a Man - video (intro ends approx. 3:20)
P. Carl Prologue UCCS - video (audio quality poor)
Keith Haring:
Journals - PDF
Keith Haring Documentary - video
Keith Haring On The Fence - video
Jack Lowery:
It Was Vulgar & It Was Beautiful: How AIDS Activists Used Art to Fight a Pandemic - thrift books
Susan Stryker:
Transgender History - PDF
Transitions, with Susan Stryker - podcast - YouTube
Lou Sullivan:
We Both Laughed in Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan 1961-1991 - trans reads
Trans Oral History: Meeting Lou Sullivan - video
A series of video interviews with Lou - playlist
Fiction / Poetry
Chinua Achebe:
Things Fall Apart (novel) - PDF
I'm trying hard to not add too much of my own commentary to this post but personally I really think it's helpful to read Things Fall Apart in theoretical conversation with The Will to Change by bell hooks and in direct conversation with one of the works it was written in response to, The Heart of Darkness
Arundhati Roy:
The God of Small Things (novel) - thrift books
Arundhati Roy talks about her life and views on the world - video
Warsan Shire:
Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head (poetry collection) - thrift books
Warsan Shire reads her poetry - video
Zadie Smith:
White Teeth (novel) - Internet Archive
White Teeth (4 part Real Drama adaptation) - videos
Zadie Smith Interview: On Bad Girls, Good Guys and the Complicated Midlife - video
A Conversation with Zadie Smith - video
Pamela Sneed:
Funeral Diva (poetry and prose collection) - thrift books
Pamela Sneed Discusses "Funeral Diva" - video
I offer you a secret meme for your time (with books I still need to add to this list):
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Alright as it is Trans Day of Visibility (Hi still not cis, still here etc.) and the final day of the extended Trans Rights Readathon I thought I would post about a few more of my favorite books by trans authors because hopefully everyone will be reading books by trans authors and about trans characters/topics all year round. Because to me this day is about supporting others in the community as much as anything else. The world is pretty on fire right now so if you can support a trans creator, artist, organization or friend today (and beyond) then do it!
So here are a bunch of shorter reads: books, graphic novels, novellas etc. I didn't really notice how many novellas I had been reading recently till making this list, but there is something about a wel- written short book that just really works for me. Also a lot of these just have really creative or lovely concepts and I am a sucker for those. Plus the characters in these are soooo good! Also a lot of these have lovely audiobooks or e-books, hence me not having a physical copy (yet). Many of these have trans characters as well, but not all of them. Though most have some form of queer rep because I don't read much that doesn't. I included muliple by some of the authors, including sequels because... I just really like them and couldn't pick just one. Most of these authors have other books that are also wonderful. And these are just a handful of examples, there are so many fabuluous books by and about people who are trans.
Six Months, Three Days, Five Others by Charlie Jane Anders
Peter Darling by Austin Chant
The Companion by EE Ottoman
The Barrow Will Send What It May by Margaret Killjoy
Taste of Marrow and River of Teeth by Sarah Gailey
Even Though I Knew the End by C. L. Polk
Upright Women Wanted by Sarah Gailey
Nimona by Nate Stevenson
Gender Queer by Mia Kobabe
The Seep by Chana Porter
Future Feelings by Joss Lake
Pet by Akwaeke Amezi
The Deep by Rivers Solomon
The Black Tides of Heaven; The Red Threads of Fortune; The Descent of Monsters; The Ascent to Godhood by Neon Yang
Finna and Defekt by Nino Cipri Coffee Boy and Caroline's Heart by Austin Chant
ID: Slide one has a stack of 10 books on a teal background. Slides two through four have a white background and four book covers and a boarder of books in the trans flag colors.
#transrightsreadathon#trans books#queer books#book recs#booklr#trans day of visibility#Six Months Three Days Five Others#trans authors#charlie jane anders#peter darling#austin chant#s.a. chant#the barrow will send what it may#Margert Killjoy#taste of marrow#river of teeth#sarah gailey#Even though I knew the end#c l polk#Upwright Women Wanted#nimona#gender queer#Mia Kobabe#the seep#chana porter#Future feelings#Joss lake#Pet#akwaeke amezi#nate stevenson
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Doesn't Frankenstein deliberately build his creature to be beautiful? Dude's already doing eugenics by selecting the most aesthetic cadaver parts.
Well yes he did and it ended up the opposite despite his best efforts but to be honest the creature is described with black hair in conjunction with the line about making him beautiful so I would say that he's building a man to his aesthetic tastes rather then attempting to make a perfect Aryan or something. Which I suppose is a kind of eugenics technically maybe depending on how you define eugenics. But I don't think it's useful to our understanding of eugenics or to our understanding of the novel to apply that lense to it. Aesthetic choices need to be made in Victor Frankenstein's build a bitch laboratory. While he might be somewhat limited in skin color by being in Germany, he can pick more or less any hair or eye color he likes any bone structure he likes and so on. The monster is by necessity intentionally designed in a way that human beings are not. So any aesthetic choices made being made differently would result in the same moral outcome. It's less selective breeding for particular traits and more like basing the face mold of your android based off somebody's porn viewing habits like in that movie ex machina with Oscar Isaac.
All that being said he was designing a monster to impress German and Swiss scientists in the 17th century of course there were eugenics involved in his reasoning on the features. But the loosely implied eugenics are not even the most racist thing about the book either. It takes time out of its day to be orientalist as fuck. When Clerval comes to school he's taking fucking oriental studies which lumps together Arab Indian and Chinese philosophy, when the monster is living in the out house of the peasants an Arab woman named Safie arrives and her whole motive for being there is that she is trying to marry Felix because in the west women are allowed to have a station in society(citation needed) and if she went back to those barbaric Muslim countries she would be forced to join a harem. And then Clerval decides his calling is to quote "aid in the European colonization of India" and that line is just glossed over, he's a completely sympathetic character, and he dies at Adam's hands before he can do it. But I don't particularly blame Mary Shelley for any of that because who was gonna tell her that that's racist? It's the background radiation on society at the time. I hope if I ever get published people reading my book in 200 years will think of me as a pioneering trans author in my genre who was low key racist because it will mean society got better on the race issue.
Anyway tl;dr maybe, but reading the creature as a stand in for marginalized people is reading way against text (I think if you're reading it as a trans allegory the against text reading could work but a racial minority reading falls apart very quickly). The book contains orientalism that is jarring to a modern audience so let's not put the cart before the horse. It like most novels written in a year that starts with a 1, is a product of its time and requires that you read it with that in mind. it's part of how you read a book
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what does tillie walden do?
i don't know.
i just finished 'are you listening?' and it left me with the same exact unidentifiable shrimp emotion that this beautiful author bestowed upon me with on a sunbeam and the end of summer. i want to curl up in a blanket and cry. i want to draw. i don't even know what this book has done to me. i want to know how tillie walden captures something [this unidentifiable but very present feeling] that no other work of art has captured for me.
are you listening? follows two women through their road trip through western texas, both traumatized and both hurting. one older and more experienced, one freshly eighteen and emotionally raw from years of sexual abuse. the road trip is the story's through line - they find a cat and the landscape begins to shift, becoming more indistinct and unreal as they travel further - but the body of the story is the characters themselves. i think the thing that gets me overall is that the characters don't mark the strangeness of the shifting landscape until well after it begins. even then, it isn't their main focus - they focus on the rawness of their pain and the friendship they find in each other. what does this do? it captures the experience of deep emotional pain, the experience wherein the world doesn't feel real - the world is already warped into darkness in your vision. the true landscape change thus becomes irrelevant to the characters - it's a product of pain. it's just how they see the world. absorption in one's thoughts makes any external weirdness perfectly possible.
to add to all of this, both the characters are gay, a fact that tillie walden so beautifully incorporates into their personalities and experiences. the warping of the world sees strangers - men in particular - become shadows, silhouettes, looming figures defined only by too-large, colorful eyes. (i think this reflects the common queer experience of not knowing who can be trusted with the knowledge of our identities. and personally, i know that when i'm in a shitty mood and am overthinking my own identity, the surrounding world begins to feel like a bunch of untrustworthy strangers.)
the landscape itself also adds to the deep isolation of this graphic novel. yes, the characters are alone on a road trip with only a cat to keep them company, but the surrounding world is also huge and foreign and unreal. they are alone with each other. to me, their own pain and this isolation compound each other; i felt myself slipping further into walden's constructed darkness as i read.
and at the end, there's hope. the world is dark and that darkness is inescapable, and then at the end of it all, the characters continue on with their lives, changed for the better.
IT MAKES ME INSANE.
tillie walden did the same thing with on a sunbeam. a group of space travelers isolated on their ship, exploring strange buildings and ultimately venturing into a strange, unknowable landscape (The Staircase). a group of travelers bonded by pain. a group of queer travelers bonded by their love for one another. a world that is fundamentally built upon queerness - upon lesbians, upon trans people. i think the recipe is ultimately similar to are you listening? pain + isolation + queerness + found family = a reader response of despair, catharsis, hope, tears.
perhaps my own response stems from the fact that on the deepest level, i most relate to the struggles of butch lesbians, if i am being entirely real with myself. what does tillie walden do? she knocks it out of the fucking park and writes a type of very real-feeling queer darkness that caters to me specifically. (chomp chomp.) but apart from my own shrimp emotions, she's also just a really fucking good storyteller. a brilliant artist, a brilliant character creator, a brilliant writer. and her graphic novels are really fucking brilliant books.
#tillie walden#are you listening?#on a sunbeam#the end of summer#graphic novels#i NEEDED to write this train of thought tumblr book review.
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stealing your question as promised: what authors do you think shaped your writing the most when you were first starting?
-mothmage
sdjkgas in middle school my favorite authors were Anne Rice and Francesca Lia Block and I think they have SENSUALITY in common even though their writing styles are SO opposite. As a teen when I was first writing I think I learned so much from both of them, like the seriousness and drama of AR but at the same time, FLB is so concise and punchy and sometimes her books are like these waterfalls of adjectives and I tried to think in that way too! Like I'm a very visual person so FLB books were like fucking crack for me, just heaps and heaps of descriptions of color and glittery and starry night skies and flowers growing where they shouldn't and it feels like poetry!
(I opened a random FLB book off my shelf and this is what I mean:
We walked up and down the hills until our legs ached, then rode the trolley car to feel rushes of salty, misty air. We had picnics and fed the swans on the lake under the flowering terra-cotta arches, drank tea and ate pastries in rooms with cupids and rosebuds painted on the walls, strolled through the park, green-dazzled, fragrance-drunk, gasped at treasures gleaming gold in the half-lit glass cases of the museum. Then we'd return with spices, fruits and vegetables from Chinatown, seafood and baguettes from the wharf.
Her writing is so simple but it's just like heaps and heaps of sensory details !! And it's an interesting spectrum between her & AR to see how much you can say and like what type of efficiency you can find, because both of them give me that same feeling and feel so sensuous to me. I WANT TO KNOW WHAT EVERYTHING LOOKS LIKE AND SMELLS LIKE AND SOUNDS LIKE, TAKE ME THERE!
So as a teen I think I was learning a lot from them both and like I remember a fic I wrote with someone at a mall and it was like my FLB moment, I was like OMG I MUST MENTION THE TACO SMELL IN THE FOOD COURT AND THE PERFUME KIOSK AND THE HOUSE MUSIC BLASTING FROM A HAT SHOP AND THE CRUNCHY SUGAR ON A PRETZEL! And that's something that's stuck with me a lot, I think. I always want to tell you how things feel and smell like we're going on a journey, okay!
They both also have a way of treating cities/locations like characters--FLB actually does this quite literally by describing cities as if they're women (like LA is a blonde woman with big sunglasses and NYC has dyed black hair with severe red lipstick that stains on her cigarette butts, etc something like that) and it feels really specific and made me think a lot about locations and settings and how they affect the characters and story! They were also both the first books I ever read with queer people! FLB's short story Dragons in Manhattan was the first story I ever read with a trans person back when I was like 12 or 13.
AND THEN as a final nail in the coffin LOL I read I Know This Much is True by Wally Lamb when I was in 9th or 10th grade and it just really like !! IDK broke my head open for character voice. I don't think I'd read it so well done before, or maybe not noticed before. LIKE I MEAN this entire concept is like asking what did WE discover as kids or whatever, like so much of it is happenstance and if it hadn't been these authors it would've been someone else, and it's not like I stopped reading LOL like I still learn things from reading all the time! But Wally Lamb really brought this home for me. Like the way he writes Dominick's narration is just so like cynical and rugged and full of hurt and it made me think a lot about like how to profile a character with the language we use. I don't think FLB does this too much bc her writing is so breezy anyway and AR is so wordy that I don't think I could pick up on it as a teenager. I get more nuance now and see it better but it's there's a base level of like fanciness and purple prose that can be hard to see through on the first try, at least for me as a teen.
ANYWAY SORRY THAT WAS A REALLY LONG RESPONSE I JUST GOT REALLY EXCITED but Anne Rice + FLB + Wally Lamb wombo combo for emotionally torturous sensory overload cynical guttermouth style.
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Okay I'm going to send you some partly-solicited recs for queer literature and classics because I have a decent amount of exposure to both~~
My qualifications include a degree in English and now being halfway towards my MLIS lol this is what I was made for
For queer lit, sometimes it depends heavily on your own orientation, like bi people want to read books with bi representation, etc. But those preferences notwithstanding, here are some generally quality titles:
Zenovia July by Lisa Bunker: A trans girl solves a cyber crime. Mystery, YA, contemporary setting, trans rep
The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune: a gay man who lives a boring government-worker life travels to an island in order to monitor the family of magical children who live there. Fantasy, found family, adult fiction (it has some kid's book vibes but does contain mild sexual content and mild swearing), gay representation.
Ace by Angela Chen -- nonfiction, part memoir exploration of what it means to be asexual, for the author personally and for society generally.
Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo -- a Chinese-American girl in 1950s San Francisco comes to terms with being a lesbian. Historical fiction, adult fiction (or might be YA?? There is what I'd call mild sexual content), lesbian representation, AAPI representation
Jeanette Winterson is a queer author whose work I generally like!(don't have specific title recs though) (I have read The Passion, and she has a couple biographies shelved in the queer library in which I volunteer. The Passion is not very explicitly queer from my memory but it is very good regardless.
For classics, here are titles that I personally Actually Enjoyed Reading and found relatively accessible:
To Kill a Mockingbird (and I also like the film-- I should have added that to my answer to your ask)
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf is my absolute favourite classic novel, but I won't pretend it's for everyone, or that it's especially accessible. It's written in a heavily Modernist style that involves a quite lyrical, non-linear plot. But the prose is breathtakingly gorgeous and it has a really moving anti-war message.
Also, Orlando by Woolf as well, and this one is also queer! Features a genderqueer/trans/otherwise gendernonconforming character.
The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins is very long, but it's a mystery, and I found it engaging. The section narrated by the character Marianne is the best, and I headcanon her as asexual or possibly a lesbian.
The Color Purple by Alice Walker is what I would call poignant, and it's fairly short. Be warned that it contains some SA content, racism, and AAVE dialect that could be hard to understand.
Macbeth or Twelfth Night or King Lear are my favourite Shakespeare works to recommend. But with Shakespeare, it's better if you can see a film or live performance, since just reading the script can be difficult to follow.
Little Women!!! God, I love Little Women. Honestly not sure how that wasn't the first one I thought of.
Oh thanks so much for the thorough response!
I’ll admit most of these are wildly outside my normal genre, but I’m always willing to try new things.
I have read Macbeth in school but it’s been ages and I am pretty sure I’ve read Little Women but I can’t remember it would have been a long time ago. Oh and To Kill a Mockingbird. I think everyone has read that in school but don’t think I’ve read it since.
I’m gonna write them down and check them out and see how it goes. I pretty much exclusively read non fiction so should be interesting 😅
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Manhunt is a life-changer, the kind of book that shifts your insides around and makes room for itself. I finished it at 3am last night, and have been wandering around the house since. I feel hollowed out. I want to- need to- read it again. Christ.
This book has a ton of Content Warnings, some stemming from genre, most stemming from its premise and perspective. CW: transphobia, dead-naming, cannibalism, dysphoria, rape, implied incest, fatphobia, public execution, slavery, torture, body horror.
Disclaimer: I'm writing this review from my perspective as a man exploring their gender, folding in They/ Them pronouns with my He/ Him. While I have considered in myself whether or not I am a woman, I don't think I am. Do with that info what you will.
I found Manhunt on a recommendation shelf at my local bookstore- shout out to Eagle Eye Books in Decatur, GA- and its cover grabbed me instantly. It's a shocking image, blunt in its implication and color. It's a fitting one, too, echoing the words inside. You're going to get grabbed and the story isn't going to let go until the last.
You can get a synopsis for the thing anywhere, so no need here. Just know that Fran & Beth's story starts with the punchline- "What if being a man turned you into a rage zombie?"- and runs red with it. Being a trans woman is already goddam hard in the real world- now imagine people looking at you the same way people in zombie movies look at people who have been bit. It's a fantastic grounding device, with Felker-Martin using it as a jumping off point to point out how fucked transphobia can get.
Speaking of rage, this book is so full of anger and hatred, righteous and otherwise. It smacks you, not just inside the content but with its construction. Felker-Martin hates transphobes, trustfund child-adults, people who will put a hashtag on their twitter profile but never do anything. She never writes this out explicitly, but the way th`e story is told? Buddy, she makes that very clear.
The characters are deliciously complex. You start with easy sketches- the pretty one, the strong one, the fat one, the TERF, the trans man, etc- but you hop from perspective to perspective often enough that things begin to mold into a rich picture.
(If I have any criticism of the book at all, it's that, occasionally, we shift perspective so fast and often that timelines can get wobbly. I'll think it's only been a few hours in-story, but then a character will mention it's been a few weeks. It course corrects cleanly, though, and never became too much of an issue.)
One of the perspective characters- Ramona- is a part of The Legion, militarized TERFs who have taken over huge swaths of the US in name of eradicating "men wearing womanface." Thing is, Ramona has a thing for trans women. By day, she's an XX chromosome tattoo wearing Nazi, by night she's sleeping with a trans lover in a secret brothel. She hates her hypocrisy (so many of the characters ooze self-hatred), but she is so caught up in the fervor of her movement that she can't slow down.
These contradictions cover the whole cast. At times, I hated them. Others, I loved them. By the end, all I wanted to do is spend more time with them.
It's here I want to say- I love you, Beth. It's obvious that the author loves you, too. Not in the "here's-some-plot-armor" way, the book isn't cheap like that. The author writes Beth and all of the other trans characters with so much empathy, personal history, and heart, it's difficult not to see them as breathing, beautiful people.
When you have a book like this- one that moves at so much force- you worry that there isn't a way in hell that it will stick the ending. Happy to report that as much of a power-drill the last act is, I left the book satisfied. I, alone in my living room, warm forgotten beer on the coffee table, wife and daughter asleep in the next room, muttered, "Whoa," when I read the last paragraph.
So, yeah. Read Manhunt. It isn't for everyone. The best art never is. But if you allow yourself to be taken by it, hold on.
Nick <3
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Top 5 novels(or series)? 👀
i miss being a bookseller and talking about books irl so this ask makes me super happy! also this is going to be long and i apologize in advance
beauty queens by libba bray
my favorite book of all time. i read it WAY too young, like in 2011 at age 12, and it massively influenced my awareness of the world, personal philosophy, sense of humor, and creative identity. beauty queens is an ahead-of-its-time ya satire novel about teenage girls getting stuck on a deserted island and going feral (positive connotation).
it features a well-balanced main cast of about a dozen diverse young women, including the first trans character i ever encountered (because i read the book pretty young, it's actually how i found people can be trans at all). while this character's execution does include a few now-questionable tropes, she's written in incredibly good faith and i am so grateful for her being in this book. beauty queens also introduced me to perspectives from women of color, disabled women, and women from religious communities that i hadn't really gotten the chance to encounter in my bubble of a hometown. while the author is admittedly a cis white straight woman, she pours so much empathy and love and nuance into each individual beauty queen, and especially for 2011 i think she did a really good job.
in addition to All That Deep Meaningful Stuff, the book is like a james bond parody with a villain clearly meant to be sarah palin set in a hyper-capitalist satirization of america, characterized by super weird and out-of-the-box "commercial breaks." i describe it in my review as "weird, campy, tropey, and over-the-top," and warn that, "if you take everything very seriously, you will have trouble with this book."
my general creative philosophy is that art is at its best and most meaningful when you have no doubt anyone else could have made it. libba bray knows exactly what she wants to write, and she fucking does that, even if some people won't understand or enjoy it. the world is a better place because this book exists, which is true of everything on this list--but this deeply weird novel, seemingly lost to time, is my all-time favorite for a reason.
sharp objects by gillian flynn
gillian flynn is my favorite AUTHOR of all time. she wrote gone girl, sharp objects, and another lesser-known novel called dark places. sharp objects is a hard one to gush about without spoilers and/or triggers, but oh my god it is a masterpiece. its final line is my favorite final line in any media, ever. i am a huge lover of the domestic thriller genre, and while gone girl is more domestic thriller than sharp objects, i think this one is the better BOOK. huge trigger warning for self-harm if the title and cover aren't enough of a hint, but hoooo boy this book is the best kind of brutal
the illuminae files trilogy by jay kristoff & amie kaufman
these sci-fi ya thrillers are told entirely through transcripts, message logs, and other "found evidence" in a dossier meant to expose an evil corporation. the characters are clever and interesting, the conflict is layered, and there's some awesome space-horror a la alien movie. there's a love story and philosophical musings and wise-cracking idiot teenagers who i adore. there's a deranged ai and beautiful page layouts and the quote, "you have me. until the last star in the galaxy dies, you have me." these are great books for people who can't stand large chunks of prose, appreciators of comics and mixed-media storytelling, and the AUDIOBOOKS are like full-on radioplays with voice actors and sfx. all three novel hold their own while still feeling cohesive when read sequentially. so unique and so freaking cool
no exit by taylor adams
idiot college art student gets snowed in at a rest stop, realizes that someone is in the middle of trafficking a child and has to a) figure out who it is and b) stop them. this thriller is gory and fast-paced and darkly comedic and does the whole cat-and-mouse hero and villain thing that always lives in my head rent-free. it's gleefully violent and reminds me of films like kill bill and american psycho. i can't and won't spoil more but this book is so fun to read, especially if you enjoy media that doesn't take itself too seriously. the movie adaptation sucks and i'll be mad about it forever, especially because taylor adams comes from a screenwriting background and i doubt they let him touch the script. there's a thematically-relevant garfield clock and nail gun used several times as a murder weapon. in my storygraph review of this book, i summed up my love for it pretty well: "Sometimes a book just speaks to you. Probably not great that this one does it for me, but at least I had so much fun."
the stepford wives by ira levin
people discuss the stepford wives as a Cultural Concept, but i wish more people actually read the novella. it's really freaking good as a work of horror and satire. it's short, too. i've been dreaming up a stage adaptation for years.
other honorable mentions: the hunger games trilogy you know who wrote it, solutions and other problems by allie brosh, anya's ghost by vera brosgol, all of mary oliver's poetry, never saw me coming by vera kurian, in a dark dark wood by ruth ware, dead to her by sarah pinborough, annie on my mind by nancy garden
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Can you suggest some lgbtq movies and books?
Recommendations eh? Well, it really depends on what type of films/books you enjoy.
Note most (though not all) feature same-sex pairings, and not all are romances per say...
In terms of films, some of the best that I've seen are:
Angels in America (2003) - an epic 4 hour mini-series based on the award winning play about AIDS in 1980s
God’s Own Country (2017) - Farm boy meets migrant falls in love
Happy Together (1997) - Starring Leslie Cheung (a favourite OF Tae's) about the dysfunctional love between two men
Hegwig and the Angry Inch (2001) - A musical about trans person with an inch of a penis
My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) - Interracial love set against the backdrop of 1980s England
Milk (2008) - Chronicles the assassination of the first openly gay politician in the US
Weekend (2011) - A love story told over a weekend
Dog Day Afternoon (1975) - Based on a true story about a bank robber robbing a bank to finance his lover's sex reasignment surgery
Y Tu Mama Tabien (2001) - Not gay really, but there is a under current throughout with a final moment of strained realisation.
Orlando (1993) - Fantasy film of a man who changes sex from man to woman and lives for centuries, meeting the key figures of English history. Considered a feminist classic.
The Birdcage (1996) - The classic comedy of gay/drag queen family dealing with a ultra conservative future in-laws
La Cage aux Folles (1978) - The original film that Birdcage is based on.
Priscilla Queen of the Desert (1994) - Three drag queens travel across Australia, on a bus for a gig and a family reunion.
Beautiful Thing (1996) - A love story between 2 teen working class boys
Pride (2014) - The story behind how striking miners and LGBTQ people supported each other.
Call Me By Your Name (2017) based on the book of the same name
Any film by Pedro Almodóvar really, some of my favs are:
Law of Desire (1987)
Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988)
All About My Mother (1999)
Bad Education (2004)
For Books:
Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City Series
The Color Purple, by Alice Walker
The Front Runner by Patricia Nell Warren
Anything by T. J. Klune
Alex Sanchez's Rainbow Trilogy (Rainbow Boys / Rainbow High / Rainbow Road)
Anything by Timothy James Beck
Where the Rainbow Ends by James Currier
Little Bits of Baby by Patrick Gale (really anything from Mr Gale is good)
Orlando by Virginia Wolfe (Orlando the film is based on this book)
Red, White & Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston (she has other LGBTQ book but I've not read them yet) - their making a movie of this book
Heartstopper series by Alice Oseman - graphic novels and novellas (also a high profile nextflix series)
What If It's Us by Becky Albertalli & Adam Silvera (both authors have written other LGBTQ books, such as Love, Simon
Simon Snow series by Rainbow Rowell
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it should have been obvious in hindsight but I'm continually finding that any critique of writing on transfeminism that goes something like "this doesn't account for [xyz form of marginalization]" is just a means of dismissing transfeminist theory altogether. crucially, the people who do this often never even bother to engage with transfeminist theory that does account for [xyz marginalization] or even so much as elaborate on how the theory being critiqued fails to account for [xyz marginalization]. more often than not, it's simply a way to shut the conversation down and force us to submit.
it's an incredibly disingenuous tactic too, as I could make the same critique about many feminist writings by tme people. I've read a decent number of them, and what I've found time and time again is that I'm lucky if the author wrote the words "trans women" even once in the entire book. that doesn't lead me to outright dismiss everything they wrote, and I am more than capable of finding value in their theory even with the caveat that it was written by a tme person who doesn't have the knowledge to write about transfeminine experiences. I'm even capable of critiquing the ways in which that missing perspective colors their views in transmisogynistic ways while still acknowledging their usefulness.
likewise, I can do the same about transfeminist writing that genuinely does fail to account for [xyz marginalization]. understanding who an author is and how their experiences shaped their writing is an incredibly important skill to develop, not just when reading political works, but in analyzing media in general. we all have various biases ingrained into us from the moment we're born, and recognizing those biases and the limits they place on an author's perspective matters. but biases exist in readers as well, and a person's biases can very easily determine how they treat authors of various demographics.
simply put, if someone's immediate response to transfeminist theory is to outright dismiss it for not accounting for the perspectives of every single person on earth, they simply don't want to acknowledge that transmisogyny is real and that trans women deserve basic human rights. any supposed concern about how people of [xyz marginalization] are left out rings hollow, because there exists transfeminist writing by those groups. if they wanted to read transfeminist writing that accounts for those factors, they just have to look for it, but they simply don't care to. it's not worth my time or energy to debate someone who refuses to engage with transfeminist theory outright.
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To bounce off the previous anon's ask, what is your favorite literary genre? Have you read/re-read any good books recently? What is a book (fiction and/or non-fiction) you feel everyone should read?
I am currently reading The Light Ages by Ian Macleod, which I swear up and down that I read as a teenager and spent a long time trying to find again, but which I don't actually remember at all. I'm pretty sure that this was one of the books which first got me into social-commentary steampunk as a genre, so yes. The books next on the list are The Stardust Thief by Chelsea Abdullah, The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina by Zoraida Córdova, and Perdido Street Station by China Miéville.
Books that I have on pre-order and are both scheduled to be released in August include Husband Material by Alexis Hall (sequel to Boyfriend Material which is one of my favorite books, a gay fake-dating romcom that always makes me laugh my ass off), and Babel: Or The Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution by R.F. Kuang (author of the Poppy War trilogy), which could not possibly be more up my alley if they had designed it in a lab. It is set in a magical 19th-century Oxford and incorporates aspects of The Secret History by Donna Tarrt and Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke, both of which are also some of my favorite books, while featuring a Chinese protagonist and exploring racism, linguistic and cultural imperialism, and why the British Empire sucks. It comes out on August 23, which is the day before my birthday, so yes, happy birthday to me.
As you can probably tell, therefore, my favorite genre is well-written literary fiction, feminist, queer, racially and culturally diverse fantasy and sci-fi, space operas and sprawling speculative-fiction sagas, historical fantasy (especially written by women of color, since I almost never read straight white male fantasy authors for, uh, many reasons) and reimagined classics. I will try almost anything if it looks interesting and/or funny (one of the quickest ways to make me lose interest is for a book to have no sense of humor at all and/or take itself way too seriously), but I have too much stuff on my list to stay with it if it doesn't grab me.
A few books not already mentioned that I think more people should read, whether because they are Serious Literature that is worth experiencing, they are good and I enjoy them, they were formative for me as a youth, or some combination of all these things, include:
The Odyssey, trans. Emily Wilson
Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie
The Historian, Elizabeth Kostova
Reamde, Neal Stephenson
Circe, Madeline Miller
The Bartimaeus Trilogy (The Amulet of Samarkand, The Golem's Eye, Ptolemy's Gate), Jonathan Stroud
The Priory of the Orange Tree, Samantha Shannon
Red White and Royal Blue, Casey McQuiston
The Mask of Mirrors and The Liar's Knot, M.A. Carrick
These are all fiction (much of my nonfiction reading is related to historian work), but I also tend to enjoy narrative nonfiction such as that of Erik Larson or Rachel Maddow. Overall, I read between 50-100 pages every night, occasionally more, but rarely less. I had a long period where I could afford neither the books nor the brainpower, as a broke and overworked PhD student, so I have been going a little hog-wild ever since.
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Episode 170 - Gender Theory & Gender Studies
This episode we’re talking about Gender Theory & Gender Studies! We discuss theory vs studies, memes, feminism, books that should exist but don’t, and more!
You can download the podcast directly, find it on Libsyn, or get it through Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Google Podcasts, or your favourite podcast delivery system.
In this episode
Anna Ferri | Meghan Whyte | Matthew Murray | Jam Edwards
Things We Read (or tried to…)
A Burst of Light by Audre Lorde
Histories of the Transgender Child by Jules Gill-Peterson
Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender by Kit Heyam
Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity by Julia Serano
Queer: A Graphic History by Meg-John Barker and Jules Scheele
Beyond the Gender Binary by Alok Vaid-Menon
A Quick & Easy Guide to Queer & Trans Identities by Mady G. and J.R. Zuckerberg
Other Media We Mentioned
BITCHfest: Ten Years of Cultural Criticism from the Pages of Bitch Magazine edited by Lisa Jervis & Andi Zeisler
Body Outlaws: Rewriting the Rules of Beauty and Body Image edited by Ophira Edut
A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf
Female Masculinity by Jack Halberstam
Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity by Julia Serano
Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us by Kate Bornstein
The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love by bell hooks
All the Rage: Mothers, Fathers, and the Myth of Equal Partnership by Darcy Lockman
For Her Own Good: Two Centuries of the Experts' Advice to Women by Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English
The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson
X-Gender, vol. 1 by Asuka Miyazaki
A Quick & Easy Guide to They/Them Pronouns by Archie Bongiovanni and Tristan Jimerson
Feminism is For Everybody by bell hooks
Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny by Kate Manne
A Girl's Guide to Taking Over the World: Writings From The Girl Zine Revolution edited by Karen Green & Tristan Taormino
Links, Articles, and Things
A small sample of Bibliocommons user-curated lists:
Early Feminism Through 1847
Feminist Classics: Third Wave Feminism, the 1990s
Trans Classics: important books about the many trans experiences
Very Short Introductions (Wikipedia)
TERF / FART / “Gender Critical”
Transgender Childhood Is Not a ‘Trend’ by Jules Gill-Peterson
Gill-Peterson is one of 1,000+ contributors to the New York Times who signed an open letter condemning the anti-trans bigotry in their coverage. Read it here.
Hark! Episode 330: Fucking Pie
20 Gender Theory/Studies books by BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, & People of Colour) Authors
Every month Book Club for Masochists: A Readers’ Advisory Podcasts chooses a genre at random and we read and discuss books from that genre. We also put together book lists for each episode/genre that feature works by BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, & People of Colour) authors. All of the lists can be found here.
Living a Feminist Life by Sara Ahmed
The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions by Paula Gunn Allen
Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza by Gloria Anzaldúa
Decolonizing Trans/Gender 101 by b. binaohan
The Crunk Feminist Collection edited by Brittney Cooper, Susana M. Morris, & Robin M. Boylorn
Beyond Trans: Does Gender Matter? by Heath Fogg Davis
Women, Race & Class by Angela Y. Davis
Asegi Stories: Cherokee Queer and Two-Spirit Memory by Qwo-Li Driskill
Radicalizing Her: Why Women Choose Violence by Nimmi Gowrinathan
White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color by Ruby Hamad
Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center by bell hooks
But Some of Us Are Brave: All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men: Black Women's Studies by Akasha Gloria Hull
Indigenous Men and Masculinities: Legacies, Identities, Regeneration edited by Robert Alexander Innes and Kim Anderson
Patriarchy Blues: Reflections on Manhood by Frederick Joseph
Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot by Mikki Kendall
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde
This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color edited by Cherríe Moraga & Gloria Anzaldúa
Colonize This!: Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism edited by Bushra Rehman
I'm Afraid of Men by Vivek Shraya
Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity by C. Riley Snorton
Give us feedback!
Fill out the form to ask for a recommendation or suggest a genre or title for us to read!
Check out our Tumblr, follow us on Twitter or Instagram, join our Facebook Group, or send us an email!
Join us again on Tuesday, March 21st when we’ll be talking about the Moving and Management of Books!
Then, on Tuesday, April 4th we’ll be discussing the genre of Domestic Thrillers!
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Idk why, but there is some undefined issue between me and my aunt that started around the time that I came out as trans masc. It’s frustrating cause she’s always been the person I could go to if I needed to talk or had questions about being an adult or was worried about something or really anything. In some ways that’s still true at times she’s still the most supportive person in my life. But at other times there’s just a disconnect. (Long vent about a family member under the cut)
She’s always known about the issues I’ve had around my body and about my dysphoria even if we didn’t know that it was called that. She was the first person to know I wanted to get something like top surgery (again we didn’t know that was a thing at the time but that was basically what I was asking for). She had always tried to help me feel better about it, she even tried to help me get a reduction when I was getting close to 18 but I stopped that cause I wanted it to be more than a reduction. When I came out as non-binary and said as much she seemed understand and want to help me with that.
All of this is why this odd tension is so confusing. I don’t see what went wrong other than the fact that I realized I was trans masc. Like she cried in the car about my testosterone which makes no sense to me. Suddenly I’m getting weird angry lectures about feminism (which fine if she wanted to just talk about it but its always so accusatory, and honestly, creeps worryingly close sounding very rad/fem like) when I bring up the fact that I don’t want to go to some states because they worry me. Or get told that she thinks I’m making being trans my whole personality just because I got rid of some Harry Potter stuff when that shit storm became more public (I honestly had no idea it was a thing until later as I’m not on Twitter and never really paid much attention to the author) despite the fact that I was never as into it as her. Sure I enjoyed the magic festivals around it and stuff but I didn’t even read all the books so I don’t see how it’s surprising. Just the other day she went on about how she doesn’t worry about how other people see her and I shouldn’t either, as if that’s any help at all and we hadn’t had that discussion before.
I don't see why I'm suddenly being treated so oddly, cause it's not like how my brother or my cousins (her sons) are treated. None of them get lectured about "women's issues" (reproductive rights and other stuff that doesn't just affect women) or told that they should be more feminine cause it doesn't matter how people perceive you. The opposite actually, my cousin asked me to paint his nails, picked a shimmery blue, and I got told not to do that again because he could get picked on for a shiny color. But I should obviously be above worrying about what people think when they see me. It's not like the fact that most people assuming I'm a girl makes feel like shit or anything. They don't get told that "you really are a boy" in some condescending manner when they forget something or do something she thinks is gross (I like to collect bugs and bones that I find, she does not think they are as cool as I do).
Part of me thinks it’s because there is something about me that she can’t understand and I think that bothers her. She gets so pissy whenever I point that out, that she obviously doesn’t understand what it’s like to be trans and/or have dysphoria. I don’t mean it in a mean way though and I’ve tried to explain that but I get nowhere. We both used to assume that my dysphoria was body image issues and that it was normal for a “girl my age” to be insecure so it seemed like something she had personal experience with.
Another part of me, though, thinks that is has to do with me wanting to get seen a boy now cause little changed before that came up. She has three sons, no daughters, and I was always her tag along to thinks like nail appointments, hair stuff, and was the designated helper for PTA meetings. We hung out all the time. Sure I very rarely participated with the nail stuff or the hair things unless I was getting it dyed but I was still usually around. She’d complain about her husband and I’d nod along, later I’d bitch about school and she’d listen maybe offer advice.
That’s all over now. We don’t go out nearly as often and when we do I always feel like I have to tread carefully about what in my life I can share. There’s just no reason for this. I don’t mind doing these things, I don’t mind following someone around while they shop if it means we get to hang out. But we don’t, because I’m a guy now and apparently that means I can’t hang out with her. Like, yeah, I’d rather not call it "girls night" but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to be around the person I used to be closest to. I don’t see why me transitioning is an issue. Me being a guy doesn't mean my personality has had some drastic shift. Just because I don't want her doing my makeup anymore doesn't mean we can hang out.
It really just feels like like I'm going to lose my closest family member over this, and I don't know how to fix it. Cause if I ask directly she'll say there are no issue but obviously there is an issue. Idk, just don't see why things had to change so drastically between us. It seems kinda ridiculous complaining about this, but it's been bothering me for a long time.
#tw vent#personal vent#family issues#trans man#transmasc#just sad#cause im not close to many people#shes better sometimes but other times#its not so great#transandrophobia#maybe ?#long post
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The Lovely Hypocrisy Of Conservative Transphobes
TLDR: The author shares the revelation that conservatives who publicly oppose trans rights secretly search for transgender content. They suggest telling more compassionate stories about conservatives to effect change, emphasizing the power of emotions and personal influence. The hypocrisy of conservative transphobes fuels momentum for the future inclusion of trans individuals.
When I shared what you’re about to read with my trans women friends, I was shocked. Not because what I shared was shocking. Although it was shocking. At least to me.
But what also shocked me was my trans women friends’ reaction. Or rather, their lack of reaction. They thought it old news. Old news! In other words, they already knew what I shared.
And, to be honest, what I found wasn’t news to me either. What was news was the trove of data supporting the fact.
I’m so glad I found the supporting data though. The data support anecdotal instances that have peppered the news…for as long as humanity has been around.
So what is the news/old news? It’s that conservatives are hypocrites. Especially when it comes to sex. Especially when it comes to trans people. That hypocrisy creates a lot of unnecessary nail-biting and hand wringing. It also creates a lot of wasted time and expense. Not to mention anxiety and self-loathing among those I love.
After all, unless one is positively focused, loving oneself is really hard in today’s society. Especially when swaths of the population hate what you are.
So let’s look at data validating the hypocrisy. The hypocrisy conservatives exhibit. Then, let’s look at this evidence through a different lens. One that can empower trans women rather than disempower them.
Conservatives are trans-attracted
The supporting data comes from Lawsuit.org. Interestingly, a trans-attracted guy gave me the links. He’s becoming an outspoken trans advocate. Kind of like me. He reached out after deciding to write a book. A book inspired by what he’s read here at The Transamorous Network. (See? We’re positively benefitting the trans community! More on that in another post!).
After a wonderful hour-long conversation, Brian shared the link. The conversation enriched us both. But the link offered me pure gold.
^^Brian’s lovely message to me via The Transamorous Network.
It linked to a Lawsuit.org article. The article claimed conservatives are “obsessed” with searching for transgender porn online.
It starts by talking about what we all know. In 2022 Republicans mounted a huge legislative effort negating trans lives. I’m not going to rehash all those details. They’re well known. What isn’t so well known is a lot of data supports the unseemly double-standard Republicans hold when it comes to trans people: they secretly love what they publicly hate.
According to the article, Republicans are trans-attracted. I would say they’re trans-obsessed. The data sure support that. Let’s take a look.
Conservative trans-obsession mapped and analyzed
According to Lawsuit.org’s research, of the almost 5 million trans and trans-adjacent porn Google searches each month, the majority of them happen in red states. The red state with the highest concentration of trans porn searches?
Texas.
^^Search terms for the list ranking include only: “shemale”, “tranny”, “femboy”, and “ladyboy”
Lawsuit.org didn’t just look at map visualizations. They wanted to be for sure about correlations they saw in the data. So they used good ol’ statistical analysis to drive home the point. What they found was…well…confirming:
While the maps and rankings might make it seem obvious that there’s a correlation between conservatism and searching for transgender porn, but by plotting linear regression trend lines, we can better understand the strength of the correlation. In these views, we look at search volume for three different keyword groups vs metro area political leaning. Each dot represents a metro area. Dots are colored their ratio of Democratic vs. Republican votes in the 2020 presidential election. The higher the value (more red), the higher the percentage of that metro area voted for Donald Trump.
How to use this information
As I said earlier, all my trans friends, including Muriel, my gf, know this intuitively. But it’s good to see it literally mapped out for us. So what can we take from this? Can we, and by “we” I mean the trans community, which includes trans-attracted and transamorous men, benefit from this information in some way?
The answer: yes.
Probably not in the way you’re thinking though. So I’ll spell it out.
As we say here all day, every day, we all create our reality. No one else does it. That means we each enjoy tremendous creative potential. We create our realities through stories we tell about reality. And, because we are free to tell any story we want, we can create any reality we want.
But if we keep telling the same stories, we’ll keep getting the same manifestational results. Don’t believe me? Look at many trans women and trans-attracted men and their dating lives.
So here’s how we can best use this information: we can use it to tell better stories about people who call us evil. And when we do that, eventually, those people will change. How that change happens doesn’t matter. The how is not our business anyway. But the change will come. If we hold to better-feeling stories of, for example, conservatives wanting to do away with us.
Erasure is pain manifest
The best stories about such people, the most empowering stories, the ones most aligned to what we want have us feeling compassion and understanding for conservatives. Not hatred and anger. Hatred- and anger-generating stories are the least empowering, the worse stories we can tell. From the standpoint of wanting improved futures, stories creating hatred and anger in us miss the mark.
If we want conservatives to change, we must literally be the change we want to see. That means telling better-feeling stories. That, in my opinion, begins with understanding what conservatives are going through. What is it that has them so upset about us?
The goal of the stories we create is, again, to engender in us compassion and understanding. Those two emotions tell us the new, improved stories are working.
So what stories can we tell? How about these:
Conservatives live in fear
They must arm themselves because of the fear they feel.
They’ve learned from their leaders that the world is scary and non-conservatives are out to get them. That has them feeling vulnerable.
Conservatives can’t accept their own humanity. Including what they naturally desire. So they attack others who are doing and having and enjoying what they can’t allow themselves to do, have and enjoy.
Conservatives are suffering. And they don’t even know it.
It’s not about you, or us
In the end, their struggle to bring back a world that can never again be has nothing to do with you. Or us. While they may see limited success in the short term, in the long term, their plans will fail. Their plans can’t succeed because those plans rest on shaky foundations. Foundations of hypocrisy and pain.
What’s more, the trans experience is expansion. It is in accord with All That Is. Nothing can prevent it. Nothing can stop it. In fact, we could tell the following story. A story that is 100 percent accurate:
Conservative anger and hatred focused on trans people only adds momentum to the trans experience becoming more. Because the more a person resists something, the bigger that thing gets. And a group of people resisting amplifies that momentum even further.
Some trans people might say “well, you don’t live in Texas, Florida or any of the other red states enacting anti-trans legislation. Easy for you to say.”
My response: That’s right. I don’t live there. I don’t have to live there to influence what happens there though. But here’s the even better news: those trans people living there have even more leverage to influence what’s happening in states like Texas and Florida. But if they’re feeling fear, insecurity and anger, they’re not leveraging the power they possess.
We are powerful beings
As individuals, we are unlimited in our abilities. But that power comes not from our action. It comes, rather, from who we’re being. Our emotions help us know moment-by-moment who we’re being. And when we’re feeling empowered, joyful, and in appreciation we are at our best.
At our best, we can have tremendous influence. Influence not needing a lick of action on our part. Or help from others. But unless you have proven this to yourself, it’s hard to believe it.
I know it. My clients are getting to believe it.
You can too.
The hypocrisy of conservative transphobes offers the trans community a lovely gift. It is the gift of momentum. The fuel that stokes the flames making those flames glow even brighter. The flames of individual trans and trans-attracted hearts and minds. Brian knows this. I know this too. The future includes trans people. Conservatives can’t stop it.
And in their efforts to try, they make that future more and more a fait accompli.
#transgender#transamorous#mtf#transattracted#transgirl#transisbeautiful#transsexual#transamorous men#transattraction#transamorous network#transphobia#transphobes#conservatives#republican
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My fellow Jukeboxer Hannah Jocelyn wrote the best response piece I have found to date on that long New York Times essay that can be summarized as "But what if Taylor Swift really is queer?" This is less of a compliment than I want it to be; the other takes I've found so far have been shallow and awful. But Hannah is a very good writer generally and you should get on the mailing list for her upcoming music newsletter.
One of the things that distinguishes Hannah, as a serious writer, from the bad takes (I'm thinking specifically of this Slate piece) is that she does not try to handwave off the fact that the essay appeared in the Times. Hannah works from the premise that Taylor Swift, the singer-songwriter, has created a character named "Taylor Swift," and has at different times leaned into and run from all the parasocial speculation about her relationship to that character: "Nobody invites parasociality quite like her, and nobody hates it like her either." Over time a lot of people, including queer people of various stripes, have read character-Taylor as queer, and given that actual-Taylor has not worked overtime to draw a sharp line between herself and character-Taylor, when she angrily disavows character-Taylor specifically in the context of a possible queer reading, it hurts. The original essay basically assumes that actual-Taylor and character-Taylor are the same person, and, given that newspapers (at least, newspapers worth the paper they're theoretically printed on) don't usually blow past such distinctions, it feels like a sanctioning of intrusive speculation.
I will say this: no one needs my permission, but as long as you acknowledge that actual-Taylor is something different, you should be able to read character-Taylor however you want. I am middle-aged, which means that when I was being taught to think critically about popular media, the so-called death of the author was still in full swing. Since the odds of getting actual depictions of gay love (much less any other stripe of non-cisheteronormativity) were so low, queering was done sneakily, mostly privately, and sometimes with a thumb of the nose at the original creator. I'm not well versed on the history of fan fiction, so I may be overstating the case, but I'm pretty sure the women originally writing Kirk/Spock slash never believed that they were getting closer to Gene Roddenberry's truth. I want to say, so it goes now, even as audiences have a bit more comfortable with the possibility of a queer Everywoman. Your Taylor is not actual-Taylor; your Taylor is still valid.
The trade-off, though, is leaving actual-Taylor alone. Hannah compares Swift's outspoken disavowal of the "sexualizing" of her female friendships to the classic story of the queer woman whose affection for a friend goes unreciprocated: "They never cared about you like you did about them." But it's also true of any parasocial love. It doesn't matter how you write Taylor Swift, or any other celebrity, in your head; it won't match the real person. It's not fair to the real person to insist on a match.
But we seem to be in an era where the idea of matching has gone from assumed-to-be-nonexistent to incredibly important. Forgive me, for this is something I've had to work out in my own head, but: I am also old enough that the entire Harry Potter phenomenon passed me by (both my kids read the books; I enjoyed the Lego-video-game versions, and that's about it), and then also old enough (and secure enough) to be confused by the depth and breadth of emotion sparked by J. K. Rowling's anti-trans comments. Right now I have a book on loan from the library (With Love, from Cold World) where a character says it's just as well his strict parents prevented him from reading the books, because "I would've been a hardcore Potter fan, and then when the author showed her TERF colors it would've broken my heart." And I thought, not for the first time: I could see being annoyed, disappointed, disgusted, sure; but why heartbroken? If you, for whatever stripe "you" are, found something expansive in those books, J. K. Rowling being unhelpfully defensive and short-sighted doesn't make that connection go away or illegitimize it. That was between you and the books, not her. It makes more sense to me to gleefully yell, "Fuck you, J. K. Rowling," and embrace the books than to heartbrokenly reject them. And again, I'm a product of my time: back in the day there was enough to deal with, and people got more energy from the former approach than the latter.
So why does the prevailing narrative now seem to need a trans-inclusionary J. K. Rowling, or an actually-gay Taylor Swift, so much? Partly because we're all prone to black-and-white thinking, wanting our heroes good and our villains bad, and so on. (Also I like to personally speculate that 12-year-olds contribute a lot more to the prevailing narrative than most of us care to admit, and 12-year-olds are even more inclined to black-and-white thinking than their adult counterparts.) But I think there's another element now: we're all authors. We're all writing; we're all performing publicly; we're all scared of being misunderstood; we none of us want to give up control of our narratives. (Taylor Swift included.) And we're not hypocritical enough to be able to say, "I can do whatever I like with your artistic output, fuck you," and then turn around and say, "Hey! That's not what I meant!"
Aella wrote an essay a while back titled "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Internet Hate." I've read it several times and found it unsettling each time. "I didn’t know how to handle being a symbol to people," she wrote. "Something about it felt off. I wasn’t supposed to be a symbol, and people were wrong in some deep, horrible way when they failed to see my humanity." And eventually: "I’m a microcelebrity, and this means that some people will use me in ways that hurt. Throw a ball, it falls. What the fuck else did I expect to happen? This is the dynamic like the earth beneath my feet is the ground."
I still don't want to accept the dynamic that Aella is in the process of making her peace with, frankly. I can talk a good game about separating the art from the artist, as above, but in truth I'm terrified too of losing control of my own narrative, of being a symbol rather than a person, of being seen as a sliver of myself, less than human. So are you, I suspect. We want to be seen as we see ourselves, and we're scared of failing. We hope that being able to say "I think about X's creative output and therefore understand X" implies "Other people think about my creative output and therefore understand me." The alternative -- that one can write and write and write and fail to be understood -- is hard to make peace with.
@cureforbedbugs (who pointed me to Hannah's essay in the first place; his newsletter's good too) recently wrote a series of essays on Taylor Swift, and in the last one he wonders if her ascension may simply be a side effect of her having gotten big right before the pop scene fractured utterly: once her star falls, no one else's will ever shine as bright, because the way we listen to and purchase and talk about pop music has changed. I wonder, though, if part of what makes Taylor Swift so compelling is how she's been dealing with these questions of narrative control so publicly, self-aggrandizingly, fruitlessly. She's tried encouraging the close readings, and disavowing them, and leaving them alone, and trying to redirect them, and "Anti-Hero" is about how none of those approaches have worked. "It's me, hi, I'm the problem, it's me," she finally sings, because the one thing she seems unable to do is relax and accept her own inevitable dehumanization. And when I hear "Anti-Hero" and sing along, I recognize something of myself in her words; which is a contribution even if I don't know her and never will.
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