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trans girl suicide museum
Literary Nonfiction. LGBTQIA Studies. Edited by Clare Kelly. one part ketamine spiral, one part confessional travelogue from the edge of gender, TGSM is a hallucinatory transmission on sex, identity, the internet, and the flickering wish not to exist in a given body at a given point in time. TGSM raises questions with which we have begun to negotiate broadly as a culture: what is actually happening to someone when they transition? how should we understand or describe such processes? what is the role of drugs, of hallucination, of imagination, in transition? is being a trans person in this moment in history--when the identity is ever more carefully traced [and tracked] by larger cultural forces--more liberated than before?
drawing its source material from chance encounters--wordless interactions in basements or bathrooms or hotel rooms--to archives of 20th century critical theory, sleepover secrets exchanged between old friends, rhetorical barbs deployed in the classrooms of elite universities, arguments on the phone with your parents across timezones, the nonverbal codes of high and low fashion, and scribbled notes on the backs of receipts for medicines you don't know how they work, TGSM is a morbid yet strangely hopeful meditation on the possibilities and meanings of gender variation in our time.
drawing its source material from chance encounters--wordless interactions in basements or bathrooms or hotel rooms--to archives of 20th century critical theory, sleepover secrets exchanged between old friends, rhetorical barbs deployed in the classrooms of elite universities, arguments on the phone with your parents across timezones, the nonverbal codes of high and low fashion, and scribbled notes on the backs of receipts for medicines you don't know how they work, TGSM is a morbid yet strangely hopeful meditation on the possibilities and meanings of gender variation in our time.
144 pages, Paperback
First published December 1, 2019
125 people are currently reading
5098 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 244 reviews
July 17, 2021
~~~~my only real criticisms are the way she talked about racism made me cringe at times, and the rich kid self-flagellation made me cringe too. tho i admire that she keeps her whiteness n wealth at the forefront of how we read this book. but sometimes when she talks about racialized and/ or class oppression as it intersects with her life, makes those two subjects feel like mere footnotes when its the very stuff of this book. (like oh btw race exists) but i also know she acknowledges that she doesn’t get down with identity politics like that.~~~~~~~~~~
Baer transforms something — the museum — that could have fell flat, because its easy to use institutions, like the museum, as metaphors and metaphors as institutions. but metaphors are just another layer of remove, that usually allows people to distance themselves from very real instances of marginalization and oppression. and when i think of how words and phrases like decolonization and anti-racism are used metaphorically, everything becomes abstracted. reading this book made me realize how flimsy a metaphor can be — how ideas and phenomena and urges are not content to live as metaphors, but become very very real. and not to say things become more important when they are ‘real’ (or acknowledged by our current epistemic politics as real), but that when marginalizations are used exclusively as metaphors, they lose their import.
Baer transforms something — the museum — that could have fell flat, because its easy to use institutions, like the museum, as metaphors and metaphors as institutions. but metaphors are just another layer of remove, that usually allows people to distance themselves from very real instances of marginalization and oppression. and when i think of how words and phrases like decolonization and anti-racism are used metaphorically, everything becomes abstracted. reading this book made me realize how flimsy a metaphor can be — how ideas and phenomena and urges are not content to live as metaphors, but become very very real. and not to say things become more important when they are ‘real’ (or acknowledged by our current epistemic politics as real), but that when marginalizations are used exclusively as metaphors, they lose their import.
February 13, 2022
This is my eat pray love
January 30, 2020
Lol I was gonna give it four stars and then was like ok Ilan why be an asshole, the book literally begins with a preface saying how it's not attempting to do anything but help trans girls not commit suicide and doesn't that deserve five stars on merit alone? Honestly I'm just worried about giving so many things five stars lately and feeling like the weight of my critical word is diluting, and the fact that I want to identify this dynamic is, in itself, testament to how this book affected me. One, good job, because it DID make me more trans, you do get transness from other people (like an STD) and this was a festering transmission! Ew but true. Idk. I've been following Hannah forever and gas her up constantly and I mean, the way she practices theorizing as individual and liberatory and accessible should have the academy nervous as they fade further into irrelevancy... This was a really worthwhile purchase/read/everyone go get it.
September 22, 2021
More trans autotheory like this. PLEASE. Baer makes sparing, meaningful use of "outside" scholarship in order to navigate (and, ultimately, negate entirely) her interior "self," and in the process, calls into question the very underpinnings of socially legible trans identity. TGSM is a transMad love letter to grime, rot, and murk and a love letter to trans and all it pollinates, while also posing a series of intellectually and affectively challenging, even contradictory, perspectives on gender (and) identity.
Seriously, whatever gender you are, whatever your relationship to your DSAB, at least one opinion herein will make you squirm. I guarantee it. Sit in the squirm. Sit in the mud. Sit in Baer's willful muchness, and appreciate the excess you were taught to cringe away from. You'll be a different person –– if you are still an individual person at all –– when you e/merge.
Seriously, whatever gender you are, whatever your relationship to your DSAB, at least one opinion herein will make you squirm. I guarantee it. Sit in the squirm. Sit in the mud. Sit in Baer's willful muchness, and appreciate the excess you were taught to cringe away from. You'll be a different person –– if you are still an individual person at all –– when you e/merge.
October 6, 2020
“A lot of people who are as rich as my family (e.g. ‘upper middle class’) seem to be confused about this and don’t refer to themselves as ‘rich,’ which I think is both evasive and also delusional. In particular, I think this evasion makes upper middle class flavor rich people experience the delusion that class oppression (and injustice and poverty etc.) isn’t their responsibility, when actually it is” (9).
“I am hesitant to use identity categories as my primary tools for decoding all of reality” (9).
“Some of the things I wrote about below, I feel differently about now, or just more relaxed about. But I also think beginner thinking can be helpful for people to see” (10).
“I think it’s weird to evaluate people’s self-expression, to say that some people have a good or bad creativity or interiority. Accordingly, I did not try to make this book ‘good,’ and if that’s what you’re into, it might annoy you” (10).
“I knew from having other rich friends in New York who were invested in sub-culture and coolness that we would often describe people by describing them in symbolic categories, for example what their job was or where they went to college, rather than how they actually were in the world” (14).
“And also I think that if there’s one thing I want to critique here it’s having critiques of things instead of just saying your underlying emotions, because abstract critique is part of patriarchy (and I know this because being socialized as a man for me, especially at fancy colleges, was being trained, over and over again, to hold power by criticizing things from a place of objectivity, instead of just saying my emotional intuition and not making up a reason for why it felt that way. […] In fact, sometimes abstract critiques make me angry which is why I developed this abstract critique of them ” (21).
“One question that I would want to ask cis people is ‘if you were assigned the other binary gender at birth, would you transition to get back the gender that you have now?’” (24).
“there’s this idea in philosophy in the last 60 years that the category of a person (or a ‘subject’) is actually socially constructed, rather than natural and /or handed down from g-d. The idea is something like ‘what if this category of ‘person’ along with all its supposedly ‘natural’ elements (gender, erotic desire, emotions, intelligence, etc.) is actually produced by culture rather than nature?” I believed this idea—that the ‘natural subject’ was not natural—for a long time but I wasn’t sure what it meant, like practically, to believe this idea if you had been told you were a ‘natural’—rather than a cultural—subject your whole life. And especially if you lived in a world where everything from deodorant commercials to the supreme court believe people are natural subjects, with DNA that tells the truth of our bodies and higher consciousness that justifies us killing animals, etc. basically what I’m saying: the category of person is a myth, but like gender, a myth we are trapped in” (30).
“She said suicide is what happens when one’s internal and external life context overwhelms one’s resources to keep living. It helped me to think of suicide like this as a kind of tipping mechanism, a result of overwhelm. In a healing/transformative framework, suicide can be prevented by changing a person’s life context or by fortifying their inner resources to tolerate the horror of being alive” (41).
“The trans girl suicide museum isn’t necessarily a place you go in order to kill yourself, much in the way that people don’t necessarily go into an art museum in order to do art” (42).
“Part of gazing at one’s self in transphobia (and perhaps in hyper-capitalist individualism consumerism in general) is the myth that looking at yourself heals you, when in fact it might be haunting you, tricking you into disemboweling yourself” (42).
“it makes more sense to describe it as being trapped in a museum because my body belongs to me and I love it, but the thing I’m trapped in someone else built and I can’t find the door” (44-45).
“I think part of the medicalized cis narrative of transness is about there being a problem with a given body, necessitating an intervention that medical professionals can deem appropriate and administer. Even though I know I repressed by transness, I’m not sure I repressed hating my body, I might actually have just felt loving towards my body” (45).
“it’s nice for me to think about transness not as just a getting-rid-of, but as a manifesting, an imagining, an inception, an integration” (45).
“…gender is inextricably relational, not merely individual” (47).
“This doctor and historian Jonathan Metzl says it doesn’t make sense to talk about schizophrenia in, say, the 15th century, because the cultural category did not exist yet. Even if people were doing a comparable set of behaviors that today we would identify as schizophrenic, the legal, social, and biological frameworks implicit in the category of schizophrenia and so the thing we talk about today […] did not exist” (48).
“In other words (and this is also from Foucault) homosexuality wasn’t invented in order to give gay people better healthcare or more respectful employers, it was invented (perhaps analogously to the way Columbus ‘discovered’ the American continent) in order to increase the reach of power, to map out, identify, taxonimize, and regulate what exists, what is known, what can be” (48-49).
“One thing I feel writing this part is that I am mad and sad that people in academia write critical theory about the stuff I’m talking about here and then compete with each other in a capitalist marketplace for who has the smartest ideas at conferences and in journals. After I got depressed about this competition dynamic in my mid 20s I avoided writing about my own ideas in public, because I didn’t want to cheapen my own emotional experience or intellectual life by competing with it, commodifying it, saying that I had the best or right analysis and then being validated by people on panels or at cocktail parties or in bars downtown” (50).
“And so when I think about it being liberating to cut off my parents I also remember that this is part of what white capitalist individualism is telling me that my adult development can be, namely choosing my gendered truth over staying in the shit with my family of origin” (57).
“…there is this other side of me that also believes it’s a respectable choice to make yourself die, and I live with that belief too, that anyone who chooses death was doing their best, and did their best to make the choice to die with integrity, and that such choices, however tragic, should also be respected. When people say suicide is wrong, they are attempting to speak for the dead, and maybe that is a mistake” (58).
“Cyrus whispered: ‘Isn’t it interesting how all the black people and all the trans people end up in the same corner,’ and I agreed that it was interesting but didn’t want to extrapolate past that, because I didn’t want to do the thing that white queers with class privilege sometimes are tempted to do, where we align ourselves with disempowered people as a way of avoiding being in the undesirable role of oppressor” (78).
“I don’t want anyone to think they are entitled to an explanation of how I related to my gender and my body, and sometimes when I’m asked my pronouns I feel like that’s what people are asking for” (82).
“Remembering this moment, I began to laugh, because I realized my second-wave feminist mother and I have something in common: neither of us want to look like a man” (91).
“The Dalai says that when your greatest student betrays you, they become your greatest teacher. Could this be true of parents and children as well? Maybe this is how I should understand my mother’s feelings about my transition, both of us feeling betrayed, both of us having something to learn” (91).
“The lived experience of transphobia for this girl—largely because of the protections afforded me in white supremacy and class oppression—is not one of constant overt aggression; instead, I mostly just experience pervasive minor humiliation […] This is part of the structure of gentrification, of expensive education, of class mobility. You identify with the thing that gives you power (e.g. having a fancy education) and then like a virus that poisons you, shrivels your ability to connect and be real with most people” (97).
“Is the idea that one would need to deteriorate or get broken down in order to be liberated? My dad asked me ‘if transitioning is supposed to be about finding your true identity and coming into yourself, then why are you and all your friends so down in the dumps?’ Transness should be purely freeing and happy, says the mainstream gay-pride-respectability-assimilation story. ‘The idea that queerness is about discovering your personal truth and therein being healed is part of a capitalist conspiracy that centers personal identity over solidarity or collective power or broader cultural and societal justice movements,’ I blurt out at my father. I’m not sure he’s totally following” (98).
“’To be clear,’ I said, ‘when privileged people make decisions on behalf of marginalized people, I believe that’s oppression. If you wanted to empower trans people, you would give them all the information, and then let them decide. You wouldn’t decide unilaterally that it wasn’t a good fit and then bar them entry or kick them out.’” (105).
“There’s this organizational theorist who’s popular at my grad school, Edgar Schein, and in a few of his books he talks about this idea that there are four relational levels in all society” (114).
“Romantic supremacy and heteropatriarchy are such that having an alternative kinship structure where your primary relationships are desexualized best friendships is, like, illegible” (115).
“One of the last books assigned to me in organizational psychology grad school was called Managing Transitions, which is about organizational change, not being trans. It’s weird though, because when I read it, it just made me cry and cry. The book is about this idea that when something changes, there’s this ethereal aura around the actual change, the emotional halo of change, called the transition. (To be clear, the author does not use the phrase ‘ethereal aura’ and certainly not ‘emotional halo’). He does, however, describe something very bizarre and haunting, which he calls the neutral zone, the liminal area between the old way of doing things and then new way, the area after change has begun but before it has reached its actualized new state. He says the neutral zone is often defined by the feeling of loss that’s experienced during a transition” (117).
“…I realized there was an implicit false equivalency between their annoyance with gender as a set of roles and my deep desire to have a differently gendered body, to have a different life. And this is a Truscum refrain: it’s fine to want to get rid of gender roles, anyone should get to act and dress however they want, but not liking gender roles doesn’t make you trans” (127).
“But I don’t want to blame shrill SJW college queers for anything, because they’re doing the same thing Truscum are doing (and the same thing I’m doing in the museum) however distastefully, which is just trying to navigate a culture that tells us personal identity matters a lot, consumer identity matters a lot. A huge part of my experience of affluent white American culture, since my childhood, was being expected to define myself as an individual, through my dress and taste and academic performance and literally any other choice I made. Like making a character at the beginning of an RPG. Public symbols as everything, starter pack meme as everything. And I think this context of constructed self-hood in alienated consumerism is conducive to anxiety, and I think young people who are negotiating with queerness and transness sometimes want those variances—especially since they’re punishable with the painful consequences of homophobia or transphobia—to do a bunch of work for them. A lot of young people—and I struggled with this too—want queerness or transness to answer the existential question, ‘who am I, when in fact the construction of that question in alienated consumer capitalism is basically unanswerable in a meaningful personal way” (129).
“Part of what this means is that having solidarity with trans people involves not imposing a universal idea of what transness is on anyone, while at the same time also staying suspicious of trans narratives that give power over to cis doctors, cis law makers, cis media moguls (for example, Truscum narratives)” (131).
“If we lived in a culture with a higher tolerance for ambiguity, rather than obsession with measurement, fixed identity, and knowability, transition wouldn’t be so confounding to people and the process might be more normal. Epistemologically, we are anal retentive. Not rigorous, just stressed out. We need to know what a trans girl is. What are you, trans people get asked. Where are you from, people of color get asked. White supremacist capitalism wants to make a map of everything, and then monetize the ways that things move around on the map. Basically literally. The museum” (131-32).
“Maybe it’s just like why k is better when you can’t buy it at CVS, because there’s some part of transness that cracks or fucks with all these cultural norms I’m talking about, and this current cultural moment of trans visibility is probably actually about securing transness in a sack of amber and declawing it and making it legible (the way gay culture has been ripped from the anonymity of the dark bathhouse and into the stagelighting of the reality show. Lots of people have critiqued this one” (132).
“But what if my transness hadn’t emerged in a context where we believe that people are self-regulating subjects? What if community had unlocked my transness?” (133).
“We’ve diagnosed transphobia to be getting misgendered, so we can start having gender diversity trainings at people’s workplaces. We can’t yet diagnose transphobia as there being police at all, and needing to get rid of cops and prisons to get rid of transphobia, so that’s not how it’s defined” (133).
“Part of why the museum is fucked is because it’s about a kind of knowledge of transness that’s about institutional power and societal control. Transness in the museum is supposed to make sense…” (135).
“It’s the idea that if when you trek to the edge of culture, when you go to a freaky misfit place […] and you really do the damn thing, it’s an opportunity to feel how outsiderness isn’t just a lonely thing, it’s also a collective thing. […] …shredding at the edges of the intolerable mainstream. And this sense of collectivism, of existing together to do imaginative non-verbal shard work at the edges of what’s possible, it’s a little antidote to the loneliness of the suicide museum” (140).
“I am hesitant to use identity categories as my primary tools for decoding all of reality” (9).
“Some of the things I wrote about below, I feel differently about now, or just more relaxed about. But I also think beginner thinking can be helpful for people to see” (10).
“I think it’s weird to evaluate people’s self-expression, to say that some people have a good or bad creativity or interiority. Accordingly, I did not try to make this book ‘good,’ and if that’s what you’re into, it might annoy you” (10).
“I knew from having other rich friends in New York who were invested in sub-culture and coolness that we would often describe people by describing them in symbolic categories, for example what their job was or where they went to college, rather than how they actually were in the world” (14).
“And also I think that if there’s one thing I want to critique here it’s having critiques of things instead of just saying your underlying emotions, because abstract critique is part of patriarchy (and I know this because being socialized as a man for me, especially at fancy colleges, was being trained, over and over again, to hold power by criticizing things from a place of objectivity, instead of just saying my emotional intuition and not making up a reason for why it felt that way. […] In fact, sometimes abstract critiques make me angry which is why I developed this abstract critique of them ” (21).
“One question that I would want to ask cis people is ‘if you were assigned the other binary gender at birth, would you transition to get back the gender that you have now?’” (24).
“there’s this idea in philosophy in the last 60 years that the category of a person (or a ‘subject’) is actually socially constructed, rather than natural and /or handed down from g-d. The idea is something like ‘what if this category of ‘person’ along with all its supposedly ‘natural’ elements (gender, erotic desire, emotions, intelligence, etc.) is actually produced by culture rather than nature?” I believed this idea—that the ‘natural subject’ was not natural—for a long time but I wasn’t sure what it meant, like practically, to believe this idea if you had been told you were a ‘natural’—rather than a cultural—subject your whole life. And especially if you lived in a world where everything from deodorant commercials to the supreme court believe people are natural subjects, with DNA that tells the truth of our bodies and higher consciousness that justifies us killing animals, etc. basically what I’m saying: the category of person is a myth, but like gender, a myth we are trapped in” (30).
“She said suicide is what happens when one’s internal and external life context overwhelms one’s resources to keep living. It helped me to think of suicide like this as a kind of tipping mechanism, a result of overwhelm. In a healing/transformative framework, suicide can be prevented by changing a person’s life context or by fortifying their inner resources to tolerate the horror of being alive” (41).
“The trans girl suicide museum isn’t necessarily a place you go in order to kill yourself, much in the way that people don’t necessarily go into an art museum in order to do art” (42).
“Part of gazing at one’s self in transphobia (and perhaps in hyper-capitalist individualism consumerism in general) is the myth that looking at yourself heals you, when in fact it might be haunting you, tricking you into disemboweling yourself” (42).
“it makes more sense to describe it as being trapped in a museum because my body belongs to me and I love it, but the thing I’m trapped in someone else built and I can’t find the door” (44-45).
“I think part of the medicalized cis narrative of transness is about there being a problem with a given body, necessitating an intervention that medical professionals can deem appropriate and administer. Even though I know I repressed by transness, I’m not sure I repressed hating my body, I might actually have just felt loving towards my body” (45).
“it’s nice for me to think about transness not as just a getting-rid-of, but as a manifesting, an imagining, an inception, an integration” (45).
“…gender is inextricably relational, not merely individual” (47).
“This doctor and historian Jonathan Metzl says it doesn’t make sense to talk about schizophrenia in, say, the 15th century, because the cultural category did not exist yet. Even if people were doing a comparable set of behaviors that today we would identify as schizophrenic, the legal, social, and biological frameworks implicit in the category of schizophrenia and so the thing we talk about today […] did not exist” (48).
“In other words (and this is also from Foucault) homosexuality wasn’t invented in order to give gay people better healthcare or more respectful employers, it was invented (perhaps analogously to the way Columbus ‘discovered’ the American continent) in order to increase the reach of power, to map out, identify, taxonimize, and regulate what exists, what is known, what can be” (48-49).
“One thing I feel writing this part is that I am mad and sad that people in academia write critical theory about the stuff I’m talking about here and then compete with each other in a capitalist marketplace for who has the smartest ideas at conferences and in journals. After I got depressed about this competition dynamic in my mid 20s I avoided writing about my own ideas in public, because I didn’t want to cheapen my own emotional experience or intellectual life by competing with it, commodifying it, saying that I had the best or right analysis and then being validated by people on panels or at cocktail parties or in bars downtown” (50).
“And so when I think about it being liberating to cut off my parents I also remember that this is part of what white capitalist individualism is telling me that my adult development can be, namely choosing my gendered truth over staying in the shit with my family of origin” (57).
“…there is this other side of me that also believes it’s a respectable choice to make yourself die, and I live with that belief too, that anyone who chooses death was doing their best, and did their best to make the choice to die with integrity, and that such choices, however tragic, should also be respected. When people say suicide is wrong, they are attempting to speak for the dead, and maybe that is a mistake” (58).
“Cyrus whispered: ‘Isn’t it interesting how all the black people and all the trans people end up in the same corner,’ and I agreed that it was interesting but didn’t want to extrapolate past that, because I didn’t want to do the thing that white queers with class privilege sometimes are tempted to do, where we align ourselves with disempowered people as a way of avoiding being in the undesirable role of oppressor” (78).
“I don’t want anyone to think they are entitled to an explanation of how I related to my gender and my body, and sometimes when I’m asked my pronouns I feel like that’s what people are asking for” (82).
“Remembering this moment, I began to laugh, because I realized my second-wave feminist mother and I have something in common: neither of us want to look like a man” (91).
“The Dalai says that when your greatest student betrays you, they become your greatest teacher. Could this be true of parents and children as well? Maybe this is how I should understand my mother’s feelings about my transition, both of us feeling betrayed, both of us having something to learn” (91).
“The lived experience of transphobia for this girl—largely because of the protections afforded me in white supremacy and class oppression—is not one of constant overt aggression; instead, I mostly just experience pervasive minor humiliation […] This is part of the structure of gentrification, of expensive education, of class mobility. You identify with the thing that gives you power (e.g. having a fancy education) and then like a virus that poisons you, shrivels your ability to connect and be real with most people” (97).
“Is the idea that one would need to deteriorate or get broken down in order to be liberated? My dad asked me ‘if transitioning is supposed to be about finding your true identity and coming into yourself, then why are you and all your friends so down in the dumps?’ Transness should be purely freeing and happy, says the mainstream gay-pride-respectability-assimilation story. ‘The idea that queerness is about discovering your personal truth and therein being healed is part of a capitalist conspiracy that centers personal identity over solidarity or collective power or broader cultural and societal justice movements,’ I blurt out at my father. I’m not sure he’s totally following” (98).
“’To be clear,’ I said, ‘when privileged people make decisions on behalf of marginalized people, I believe that’s oppression. If you wanted to empower trans people, you would give them all the information, and then let them decide. You wouldn’t decide unilaterally that it wasn’t a good fit and then bar them entry or kick them out.’” (105).
“There’s this organizational theorist who’s popular at my grad school, Edgar Schein, and in a few of his books he talks about this idea that there are four relational levels in all society” (114).
“Romantic supremacy and heteropatriarchy are such that having an alternative kinship structure where your primary relationships are desexualized best friendships is, like, illegible” (115).
“One of the last books assigned to me in organizational psychology grad school was called Managing Transitions, which is about organizational change, not being trans. It’s weird though, because when I read it, it just made me cry and cry. The book is about this idea that when something changes, there’s this ethereal aura around the actual change, the emotional halo of change, called the transition. (To be clear, the author does not use the phrase ‘ethereal aura’ and certainly not ‘emotional halo’). He does, however, describe something very bizarre and haunting, which he calls the neutral zone, the liminal area between the old way of doing things and then new way, the area after change has begun but before it has reached its actualized new state. He says the neutral zone is often defined by the feeling of loss that’s experienced during a transition” (117).
“…I realized there was an implicit false equivalency between their annoyance with gender as a set of roles and my deep desire to have a differently gendered body, to have a different life. And this is a Truscum refrain: it’s fine to want to get rid of gender roles, anyone should get to act and dress however they want, but not liking gender roles doesn’t make you trans” (127).
“But I don’t want to blame shrill SJW college queers for anything, because they’re doing the same thing Truscum are doing (and the same thing I’m doing in the museum) however distastefully, which is just trying to navigate a culture that tells us personal identity matters a lot, consumer identity matters a lot. A huge part of my experience of affluent white American culture, since my childhood, was being expected to define myself as an individual, through my dress and taste and academic performance and literally any other choice I made. Like making a character at the beginning of an RPG. Public symbols as everything, starter pack meme as everything. And I think this context of constructed self-hood in alienated consumerism is conducive to anxiety, and I think young people who are negotiating with queerness and transness sometimes want those variances—especially since they’re punishable with the painful consequences of homophobia or transphobia—to do a bunch of work for them. A lot of young people—and I struggled with this too—want queerness or transness to answer the existential question, ‘who am I, when in fact the construction of that question in alienated consumer capitalism is basically unanswerable in a meaningful personal way” (129).
“Part of what this means is that having solidarity with trans people involves not imposing a universal idea of what transness is on anyone, while at the same time also staying suspicious of trans narratives that give power over to cis doctors, cis law makers, cis media moguls (for example, Truscum narratives)” (131).
“If we lived in a culture with a higher tolerance for ambiguity, rather than obsession with measurement, fixed identity, and knowability, transition wouldn’t be so confounding to people and the process might be more normal. Epistemologically, we are anal retentive. Not rigorous, just stressed out. We need to know what a trans girl is. What are you, trans people get asked. Where are you from, people of color get asked. White supremacist capitalism wants to make a map of everything, and then monetize the ways that things move around on the map. Basically literally. The museum” (131-32).
“Maybe it’s just like why k is better when you can’t buy it at CVS, because there’s some part of transness that cracks or fucks with all these cultural norms I’m talking about, and this current cultural moment of trans visibility is probably actually about securing transness in a sack of amber and declawing it and making it legible (the way gay culture has been ripped from the anonymity of the dark bathhouse and into the stagelighting of the reality show. Lots of people have critiqued this one” (132).
“But what if my transness hadn’t emerged in a context where we believe that people are self-regulating subjects? What if community had unlocked my transness?” (133).
“We’ve diagnosed transphobia to be getting misgendered, so we can start having gender diversity trainings at people’s workplaces. We can’t yet diagnose transphobia as there being police at all, and needing to get rid of cops and prisons to get rid of transphobia, so that’s not how it’s defined” (133).
“Part of why the museum is fucked is because it’s about a kind of knowledge of transness that’s about institutional power and societal control. Transness in the museum is supposed to make sense…” (135).
“It’s the idea that if when you trek to the edge of culture, when you go to a freaky misfit place […] and you really do the damn thing, it’s an opportunity to feel how outsiderness isn’t just a lonely thing, it’s also a collective thing. […] …shredding at the edges of the intolerable mainstream. And this sense of collectivism, of existing together to do imaginative non-verbal shard work at the edges of what’s possible, it’s a little antidote to the loneliness of the suicide museum” (140).
August 7, 2023
{review is from first time reading this,, read it again a couple years later and gave it 5 stars} I know the book starts and mentions the disclaimer again every few pages, but white feminism/queerness/transness with general financial or familial support is entirely disconnected from the struggles of trans women in reality. There were a few parts where I laughed and saw myself in Baer's words, but only in parts about gender dysphoria/euphoria. I'm not really against this book, but I think it's dangerous if non-trans people use this essay as a reference for the general trans experience, because it's nothing like it–not even a "perfect" version of it. If you wanted to learn more about the trans experience, read something like Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love & So Much More before reading this; this shouldn't be the first trans book you're exposed to. The few and far in-between pages that I related to in the essay couldn't make up the chapters & chapters of experiences and influences that didn't apply to me or other trans people I know, and I think that's why I lost the energy to finish it. I'm kind of glad my parents threw this away, but the cover was giving mood and I do miss my last magnet mustache bookmark :(
Side note: It says a lot about your position (not your character, I actually think she's really sweet) when you can talk about casual drug abuse simply because you have the access, not because it was a product of your environment.
Side note: It says a lot about your position (not your character, I actually think she's really sweet) when you can talk about casual drug abuse simply because you have the access, not because it was a product of your environment.
November 23, 2022
Is it weird that I feel weird abt cis people reading this book? Or at least cis people who are not in close loving relationship with trans people. This book is by/for/about a very specific trans experience that was at parts affirming and at others…it felt scary for me what trans people struggling with suicidality or substance abuse might take away from this work. Very glad I read it, very glad she wrote it, but certainly not for everyone. Very impressed with the way Hannah talks about positionality & works in academic concepts.
September 7, 2021
hannah clumsily sliding her way through the city too high on k trying to reach a shop to buy a new juul is a certain sort of allegorical figure I’ll hold on to for a long time, something to embody when it all seems too much or I feel so incapable. so much in here that makes me feel so much less alone especially at my most alien
March 16, 2025
April 2023
When I was reading this book I really wanted to die. I didn't plan anything and I wasn't a physical danger to myself, but it was the most dramatic, persistent feeling I've ever had. The past few months have been absolutely miserable. I have been entirely unable to see a future that I will not have to lie in. I cannot imagine a reality in which I am happy as an adult. Even now, on the other side of this episode or whatever you want to call it, the only reason I can function is because I'm not thinking of the future.
I love trans people who are happy. I love trans people who can fit with cis people and be happy, but I couldn't be around them. I became really frustrated with my perceived inability to relate to any of the trans people I had a chance of being close to. I cried coming home too many times because I felt like a freak compared to all the other freaks (affectionate). So, I looked online for other doomers.
In February I became a pretty regular lurker on black-pilled, boymoding, trans girl twitter. I didn't post because I didn't want to take up any space. I just listened to people talk about being very sad. Obviously, this didn't help my doom spiral, but it did help me realize that that is an experience that I relate to much more than the experiences of the trans guys the internet likes to show me. Don't get me wrong, I love them, but I don't get them. Eventually I realized that it was probably a bad idea to constantly surround myself with the ideas and sadness of trans people whose urls are marked red by shinigami eyes (i am not transmedicalist or truscum btw i am too cool for that). I found this book as a sort of middle ground. Here is a girl who is somewhat like me (in the way that she is trans and sad) but who is/has medically and socially transitioned.
This book was not made for me, it is made for girls, it made me very uncomfortable, it was probably too "mature" for me to be reading; I don't care. This book did not make me happier. In fact it probably made me feel much worse, but it did do something else for me.
I think this book made me braver.
I mostly read this book outside of my house. I can't say why, I just felt like I should. I started reading it in rehearsal like 4 days before the show I was in. I wanted something that would show the people I was around that I wasn't being entirely honest. I wanted them to see the title and think about why I would be reading it. I wanted them to know I wasn't like them.
I don't want to give you the context because I don't want to explain who I am. I'm out but not (everyone thinks i'm nonbinary; i'm not). My town is fine but it's entirely performative. That's all you get.
I read this book on the subway a lot. I have developed a genuine fear of people wearing red sox hats. I think that's valid. I did read this book while sitting next to a red sox fan. I would have preferred if they were wearing a sonic hat but it's okay. Nothing bad happened.
I finished this book laying under a chair in the backyard of the most abrasive members of my extended family. I was hiding both the cover and the content and looking very cool and suspicious doing it. I think I kinda wanted to be caught. I wanted to not lie all the time.
At the point I finished this book, (June 11th) I could not feel anything. One of my parents did that fun thing they do sometimes where they refer to me and say "girl, boy, whatever you are.". I hate this charade when we're not in front of a bunch of people who would respect me even less if they knew what I am or what I'm not. But I couldn't bring myself to care. It was kind of cool not to care, even though I'm so desperately afraid of every single person in my family.
I finished it, and I keep being brave in my own idiotic ways. A week ago I was sitting on the subway between an old couple (I was separating them). Before, I would have changed the horrible (affectionate) transgender music in my headphones to something more acceptable or at least turned it down. I didn't do that. I could tell they could hear it. I could tell they were both uncomfortable because they kept looking at me. This sounds like the dumbest thing ever, but it felt big. Maybe you don't think that's brave, and that's okay.
I love this book because it is honest. I felt like I was reading someone's diary. I started writing more when I read this because I wanted to be honest for once. That's why this review sucks so bad, I'm just trying to be honest for once. I love this book because I don't agree with everything. There are a decent amount of reviews talking about how Baer talks about race. I agree, it's very cringe, but I also think it's by admitting to those thoughts that you can become more aware of what's weird about them. That's honesty. I have more to say but I really don't feel like doing it now. Maybe I'll come back to this.
This is probably the worst review I've ever written. I barely talked about the book, just myself. It's okay. I'm very self centered at the moment, and I'm allowed to be that. It is summer, and I no longer want to die. I'm still sad, but now I just want to read Chainsaw Man
When I was reading this book I really wanted to die. I didn't plan anything and I wasn't a physical danger to myself, but it was the most dramatic, persistent feeling I've ever had. The past few months have been absolutely miserable. I have been entirely unable to see a future that I will not have to lie in. I cannot imagine a reality in which I am happy as an adult. Even now, on the other side of this episode or whatever you want to call it, the only reason I can function is because I'm not thinking of the future.
I love trans people who are happy. I love trans people who can fit with cis people and be happy, but I couldn't be around them. I became really frustrated with my perceived inability to relate to any of the trans people I had a chance of being close to. I cried coming home too many times because I felt like a freak compared to all the other freaks (affectionate). So, I looked online for other doomers.
In February I became a pretty regular lurker on black-pilled, boymoding, trans girl twitter. I didn't post because I didn't want to take up any space. I just listened to people talk about being very sad. Obviously, this didn't help my doom spiral, but it did help me realize that that is an experience that I relate to much more than the experiences of the trans guys the internet likes to show me. Don't get me wrong, I love them, but I don't get them. Eventually I realized that it was probably a bad idea to constantly surround myself with the ideas and sadness of trans people whose urls are marked red by shinigami eyes (i am not transmedicalist or truscum btw i am too cool for that). I found this book as a sort of middle ground. Here is a girl who is somewhat like me (in the way that she is trans and sad) but who is/has medically and socially transitioned.
This book was not made for me, it is made for girls, it made me very uncomfortable, it was probably too "mature" for me to be reading; I don't care. This book did not make me happier. In fact it probably made me feel much worse, but it did do something else for me.
I think this book made me braver.
I mostly read this book outside of my house. I can't say why, I just felt like I should. I started reading it in rehearsal like 4 days before the show I was in. I wanted something that would show the people I was around that I wasn't being entirely honest. I wanted them to see the title and think about why I would be reading it. I wanted them to know I wasn't like them.
I don't want to give you the context because I don't want to explain who I am. I'm out but not (everyone thinks i'm nonbinary; i'm not). My town is fine but it's entirely performative. That's all you get.
I read this book on the subway a lot. I have developed a genuine fear of people wearing red sox hats. I think that's valid. I did read this book while sitting next to a red sox fan. I would have preferred if they were wearing a sonic hat but it's okay. Nothing bad happened.
I finished this book laying under a chair in the backyard of the most abrasive members of my extended family. I was hiding both the cover and the content and looking very cool and suspicious doing it. I think I kinda wanted to be caught. I wanted to not lie all the time.
At the point I finished this book, (June 11th) I could not feel anything. One of my parents did that fun thing they do sometimes where they refer to me and say "girl, boy, whatever you are.". I hate this charade when we're not in front of a bunch of people who would respect me even less if they knew what I am or what I'm not. But I couldn't bring myself to care. It was kind of cool not to care, even though I'm so desperately afraid of every single person in my family.
I finished it, and I keep being brave in my own idiotic ways. A week ago I was sitting on the subway between an old couple (I was separating them). Before, I would have changed the horrible (affectionate) transgender music in my headphones to something more acceptable or at least turned it down. I didn't do that. I could tell they could hear it. I could tell they were both uncomfortable because they kept looking at me. This sounds like the dumbest thing ever, but it felt big. Maybe you don't think that's brave, and that's okay.
I love this book because it is honest. I felt like I was reading someone's diary. I started writing more when I read this because I wanted to be honest for once. That's why this review sucks so bad, I'm just trying to be honest for once. I love this book because I don't agree with everything. There are a decent amount of reviews talking about how Baer talks about race. I agree, it's very cringe, but I also think it's by admitting to those thoughts that you can become more aware of what's weird about them. That's honesty. I have more to say but I really don't feel like doing it now. Maybe I'll come back to this.
This is probably the worst review I've ever written. I barely talked about the book, just myself. It's okay. I'm very self centered at the moment, and I'm allowed to be that. It is summer, and I no longer want to die. I'm still sad, but now I just want to read Chainsaw Man
February 16, 2020
I didn't expect to be saying this, but it dripped with a steep privilege that I just found noxious. The candor is appreciated though. In the spirit of keeping up with the whole business of reviews, I couldn't leave this hanging.
May 10, 2025
4.5
This is another one of those books written by a trans woman that makes me want to scream at people, proselytizing, “read this!!! read this! please, my soul is in here!” I think in my deepening understanding of myself and in further reading about trans perspectives I have become increasingly frustrated with mainstream cis society; it’s so easy to feel like an alien freak because it’s not really an imagined feeling, it really feels like no one understands you and even people that are nice don’t really get it most the time. I tried typing that out in the least teenage get-out-of-my-room-mom-core way I could but alas. I hope my point gets across. Reading books that make me feel understood is so earth shatteringly valuable for this very reason. It’s like a revelation of reassurance on such a foundational level given so much of pushing back against transphobia isn’t just pushing back against hate or disgust but trying to justify that your very existence is real.
I don’t know if this is a good trans 101 book though, it’s always hard for me to tell with these things what cis people could take away from them. On one hand I don’t want cis people reading this because it would feel borderline sacrilegious but on the other I do want to be understood, and on a broader level I do think open minded people of any gender variety could gain a broadened perspective from this.
Part of what makes this book particularly conducive to this end is that it’s written in such a casual way—admittedly sometimes to its detriment. There is a noticeable lack of editing and even contradictions in what Baer writes at times, but also that’s the point. The book begins with an introduction explaining this very format. It’s raw, diy, honest, very diary entry. It feels like being in conversation with other queer people at 2 a.m. bc you’re just going back and forth for hours about what it means to inhabit a body and a gender or like accidentally getting a glance at some stranger’s notes app. In this way, it makes its theory accessible and its stories intimate.
I prefer the second half to the first, the final handful of chapters really blew me away, but this whole thing is packed with insights—some things I have thought before, others I haven’t been able to quite articulate, and some things I never would’ve thought ever (I seriously do not have that many thoughts about ketamine, can’t say I’ve tried it, but Hannah sure does!)
This book made me feel better. I think I’ve been trapped in the museum lately and being able to understand that through the language this book provides will hopefully prove to be beneficial.
This is another one of those books written by a trans woman that makes me want to scream at people, proselytizing, “read this!!! read this! please, my soul is in here!” I think in my deepening understanding of myself and in further reading about trans perspectives I have become increasingly frustrated with mainstream cis society; it’s so easy to feel like an alien freak because it’s not really an imagined feeling, it really feels like no one understands you and even people that are nice don’t really get it most the time. I tried typing that out in the least teenage get-out-of-my-room-mom-core way I could but alas. I hope my point gets across. Reading books that make me feel understood is so earth shatteringly valuable for this very reason. It’s like a revelation of reassurance on such a foundational level given so much of pushing back against transphobia isn’t just pushing back against hate or disgust but trying to justify that your very existence is real.
I don’t know if this is a good trans 101 book though, it’s always hard for me to tell with these things what cis people could take away from them. On one hand I don’t want cis people reading this because it would feel borderline sacrilegious but on the other I do want to be understood, and on a broader level I do think open minded people of any gender variety could gain a broadened perspective from this.
Part of what makes this book particularly conducive to this end is that it’s written in such a casual way—admittedly sometimes to its detriment. There is a noticeable lack of editing and even contradictions in what Baer writes at times, but also that’s the point. The book begins with an introduction explaining this very format. It’s raw, diy, honest, very diary entry. It feels like being in conversation with other queer people at 2 a.m. bc you’re just going back and forth for hours about what it means to inhabit a body and a gender or like accidentally getting a glance at some stranger’s notes app. In this way, it makes its theory accessible and its stories intimate.
I prefer the second half to the first, the final handful of chapters really blew me away, but this whole thing is packed with insights—some things I have thought before, others I haven’t been able to quite articulate, and some things I never would’ve thought ever (I seriously do not have that many thoughts about ketamine, can’t say I’ve tried it, but Hannah sure does!)
This book made me feel better. I think I’ve been trapped in the museum lately and being able to understand that through the language this book provides will hopefully prove to be beneficial.
March 22, 2025
An absolute gem of creative memoir/nonfiction/essays on transness. 5/5 🌟
March 23, 2021
formative + beautiful + delicate, and also insanely annoying at times
October 26, 2023
not any good from a literary perspective, which she very self-consciously acknowledges within the text. it is in general unbearably self-conscious yet self-obsessed, endless rambling observations that to a transsexual of many years do not seem so fascinating. but everybody thinks they're a genus early transition. neurotic scatterbrained blog posts cobbled into a book. that it had no writerly distance from it's subject prevented it from being a compelling depiction of the time of her life she's describing, or any of the personal flaws she obsesses over in the book; if baer had sat on these diary entries for a few years or more, maybe she could have done something with them like elif batumans "the idiot" or imogine binnies "nevada". i read the book because i read a smart review by her, so she can actually write and maybe she will eventually do something like that. i hope at least some of the early transition people who read it think she is as cool as she does and this book is helpful to them in the way she virtuously professes the intention that it might be
Read
February 28, 2024no stars cuz how tf do u rate someone's experience. but for reference, if this is not the my favourite thing I've read by the end of the year it will definitely be the one that sticks w/ me the most. it kinda scratches the same itches that Michelle Houellebecq does (for some reason??), but here it's written with tenderness and understanding instead of being written by the Dogfucker General. this also made me realise some things abt myself/mybody and piece some stuff together, like for example why do I get severe nausea to the verge of almost throwing up when i have to fill out documents. it's not the paper it's having your identity categorized, solidified, and summarised in its entirety by a couple of charcoal digits on a page. M, Place Transylvania, Eyes B, Hair Brown. horrible. idk why i write about this but maybe books that make you not just appreciate them but appreciate yourself do that. anyway, good shit.
December 19, 2023
I hope this helped someone as much as it pissed me off
December 11, 2023
Rauwer en eerlijker dan een hoop andere boeken die ik recentelijk heb gelezen.
March 22, 2023
4.5 stars rounded up because this will HIT HARD for those that can see themselves in this book.
I read this almost like a poetry book, bit by bit whenever I had a few spare minutes over the course of the last few months and it was SO easy to get back into.
It’s messy and unorganized and confusing at times, which is kind of the point. It’s nuanced and thoughtful and every other page I’d had to stop and really think. THINK. THIS BOOK MADE ME THINK.
I would really like to reread this in a book club setting so I can go back and highlight, dissect, and discuss some of the incredible thoughts and lines in this. Because it really was filled with lots of Oh! moments.
Highly recommend definitely read it. Happy TransRightsReadAThon Week! And also this book made me want to try K??? I mean i won’t but like???
I read this almost like a poetry book, bit by bit whenever I had a few spare minutes over the course of the last few months and it was SO easy to get back into.
It’s messy and unorganized and confusing at times, which is kind of the point. It’s nuanced and thoughtful and every other page I’d had to stop and really think. THINK. THIS BOOK MADE ME THINK.
I would really like to reread this in a book club setting so I can go back and highlight, dissect, and discuss some of the incredible thoughts and lines in this. Because it really was filled with lots of Oh! moments.
Highly recommend definitely read it. Happy TransRightsReadAThon Week! And also this book made me want to try K??? I mean i won’t but like???
February 1, 2024
I liked this for its hybrid of auto-writing and trans theory and drug hallucinations and questions raised about transitioning and just existing in a current society that is more accepting of trans people than it's been in the past, but also still so oppressive and violent to the trans community. Baer admits her privilege in being white and financially well-off, and not just in a disclaimer-y sort of way at the beginning, but does seem to examine or call out how trans folks without that privilege wouldn't be afforded her exact experience. This didn't feel annoying to me, the way it did to some reviewers. Overall, I think I just enjoyed the way this circled around both theory using interrogation and drug-induced, diary-style entries.
October 19, 2023
really annoying but that also somehow feels like the point
April 6, 2024
si tuviese que definir el libro es una palabra sería “crudeza”. me encanta que literalmente sea como leer las notas del móvil de alguien (no es que “sea como” es que ella dice que son sus notas del iphone) y toda la reflexión que hace sobre la conciencia de clase, el racismo, etc. (claramente también me encantó como habla de su propia transición e, incluso, sentí que me chillaba, pero unos chillos entre amigas, ¿sabéis?). siento que este tipo de autobiografías son muy necesarias, con un lenguaje directo y violento, para que te sientas ofendida por tus propias acciones y te des cuenta de tus propios errores. (sería un 4,5 para mí y ese 0,5 que se queda por el camino es que en ocasiones hannah me ha parecido una petarda, en el buen sentido, pero una petarda). bueno y completamente obsesionada con como utiliza la idea del museo junto a su corporalidad… qué lista!!!!! me encantó, aparte de que hay un capítulo donde habla de recuerdos, de archivos de vidas pasadas… buenísimo.
“it makes more sense to describe it as being trapped in a museum because my body belongs to me and i love it, but the thing i’m trapped in someone else built and i can’t find the door”
“dysphoria is not merely about wanting to be hot, nor about my sick brain in my healthy body-it’s about daily threats of violence, about not being witnessed or interpolated as i want to, and the ways people react when they feel fear about yout transness”
“i tell a trans friend that cis girls used to want to fuck me, and now they have no idea what to do with my body, are afraid to touch my penis. “of course they’re afraid”, my friend says, “your body is haunted””
(ya paro supongo que podría citar todo el libro así que leeroslo!!!!!!)
“it makes more sense to describe it as being trapped in a museum because my body belongs to me and i love it, but the thing i’m trapped in someone else built and i can’t find the door”
“dysphoria is not merely about wanting to be hot, nor about my sick brain in my healthy body-it’s about daily threats of violence, about not being witnessed or interpolated as i want to, and the ways people react when they feel fear about yout transness”
“i tell a trans friend that cis girls used to want to fuck me, and now they have no idea what to do with my body, are afraid to touch my penis. “of course they’re afraid”, my friend says, “your body is haunted””
(ya paro supongo que podría citar todo el libro así que leeroslo!!!!!!)
September 8, 2025
Perhaps more niche than any other T4T books I’ve reviewed, but some might argue, extremely relevant *to me*.
This book is a series of essays on the trans experience written by a privileged trans girl who does a lot of drugs, specifically K, and parties a lot. To my followers, that might remind you of a certain someone. And oh my, does Hannah have a lot of thoughts about being a privileged trans girl who does a lot of K.
Midway through, I was thinking of giving this merely 4 stars, as there is a lot of self-flagellation on her whiteness and privilege, which was a bit too much. Like we get it, this isn’t about the universal trans experience, the grad school and chem-sex makes that clear enough lol.
But in the later half, there were lines and while paragraphs that made me go “yes yes, that’s a succinct and beautiful way to capture what I’m feeling inside me right now.” There’s some passages here that really resonated with me. I almost want to find Hannah whatever New York rave she’s at this weekend and grab her by the shoulders and go “thank you, I needed to know that there are more people like us out there. That you’re out there feeling what I’m feeling.”
Definitely worth reading, though I would take these essays for what they are… essays about the Trans Suicide Museum we keep of ourselves within our head. Applicable to a certain archetype of trans woman.
Perhaps the way to cope and figure things out is by snorting some powder and sleeping around with all of your queer friends and dancing to some music. That at the end of the day, we can only exist as we are.
At least, that’s what I took away from it.
This book is a series of essays on the trans experience written by a privileged trans girl who does a lot of drugs, specifically K, and parties a lot. To my followers, that might remind you of a certain someone. And oh my, does Hannah have a lot of thoughts about being a privileged trans girl who does a lot of K.
Midway through, I was thinking of giving this merely 4 stars, as there is a lot of self-flagellation on her whiteness and privilege, which was a bit too much. Like we get it, this isn’t about the universal trans experience, the grad school and chem-sex makes that clear enough lol.
But in the later half, there were lines and while paragraphs that made me go “yes yes, that’s a succinct and beautiful way to capture what I’m feeling inside me right now.” There’s some passages here that really resonated with me. I almost want to find Hannah whatever New York rave she’s at this weekend and grab her by the shoulders and go “thank you, I needed to know that there are more people like us out there. That you’re out there feeling what I’m feeling.”
Definitely worth reading, though I would take these essays for what they are… essays about the Trans Suicide Museum we keep of ourselves within our head. Applicable to a certain archetype of trans woman.
Perhaps the way to cope and figure things out is by snorting some powder and sleeping around with all of your queer friends and dancing to some music. That at the end of the day, we can only exist as we are.
At least, that’s what I took away from it.
Read
April 2, 2024messy, useful, good
May 22, 2025
“If we lived in a culture that was less homophobic and anxious about homosexual experience, then transness would be less troublesome, since part of what transness does is trouble the assumptions around the construction of homosexuality (e.g. how can I be a dyke if i am fucking someone's vagina with my penis). Or as I said to my mom, "I'm a chick with a dick, so anyone who wants to fuck me is basically gay" (she didn't totally understand).”
Schönes Buch über ihre Erfahrung mit dem Thema Trans sein
Schönes Buch über ihre Erfahrung mit dem Thema Trans sein
June 24, 2025
❤️🔥❤️🔥❤️🔥❤️🔥❤️🔥❤️🔥❤️🔥❤️🔥❤️🔥❤️🔥❤️🔥❤️🔥❤️🔥❤️🔥❤️🔥❤️🔥❤️🔥❤️🔥❤️🔥❤️🔥❤️🔥❤️🔥❤️🔥❤️🔥❤️🔥❤️🔥❤️🔥❤️🔥❤️🔥❤️🔥❤️🔥❤️🔥❤️🔥❤️🔥
March 7, 2025
addictive! wanted to share some quotes that i think will prove to be super generative for me in time, so i want to save them here:
“And also I think that if there’s one thing I want to critique here it’s having critiques of things instead of just saying your underlying emotions, because abstract critique is a part of patriarchy (and I know this because being socialized as a man for me, especially at fancy colleges, who is being trained, over and over again, to hold power by criticizing things from a place of objectivity, instead of just saying my emotional intuition, and not making up a reason for why it felt that way).” (p. 21)
“in this moment, something catalyzed that was weirder and more concrete—sort of?—, which was like this image of a giant blue molten circle, so big that if you were looking at the center of it, it would be everything you could see, there would be nothing else, mass culture when you’re in the center of it, a blue sun, seeing nothing but assimilation. And then there was the answer to my question about exceptionalism, at the very edge of the molten blue-sun-center-of-things, because if I moved where I was looking at the central circle was tinged with a fiery, electrical edge, tiny, explosive sparks, little nodes of invention, creativity, resistance, each person who is chosen to walk on the edge by going to the rave, and taking their clothes off and taking the drugs and dancing for hours, maybe not doing violent interaction, but still participating in a collective Smulders, and crackles at the edge of the center-of-things, for process instead of product, just to burn the thing, just to say fuck you, just to feel moments of non-differentiation, blended consciousness, merging and splitting and cascading.” (p. 139)
“And also I think that if there’s one thing I want to critique here it’s having critiques of things instead of just saying your underlying emotions, because abstract critique is a part of patriarchy (and I know this because being socialized as a man for me, especially at fancy colleges, who is being trained, over and over again, to hold power by criticizing things from a place of objectivity, instead of just saying my emotional intuition, and not making up a reason for why it felt that way).” (p. 21)
“in this moment, something catalyzed that was weirder and more concrete—sort of?—, which was like this image of a giant blue molten circle, so big that if you were looking at the center of it, it would be everything you could see, there would be nothing else, mass culture when you’re in the center of it, a blue sun, seeing nothing but assimilation. And then there was the answer to my question about exceptionalism, at the very edge of the molten blue-sun-center-of-things, because if I moved where I was looking at the central circle was tinged with a fiery, electrical edge, tiny, explosive sparks, little nodes of invention, creativity, resistance, each person who is chosen to walk on the edge by going to the rave, and taking their clothes off and taking the drugs and dancing for hours, maybe not doing violent interaction, but still participating in a collective Smulders, and crackles at the edge of the center-of-things, for process instead of product, just to burn the thing, just to say fuck you, just to feel moments of non-differentiation, blended consciousness, merging and splitting and cascading.” (p. 139)
November 5, 2020
“he was simply noting, i think, that it takes a certain type of fearlessness to approach the totem of ones assigned gender and say “despite the fact that i will not be awarded for what i am about to do, i will desecrate this shrine such that only weird people will think i’m sexy forever”
January 13, 2024
Am I a bad queer person because I'm monogamous and don't really fuck with drugs? Cause that's sort of the vibe I got from this lol
Interesting insights but the sort of terminally online presentation of everything really falls flat and maybe writing sober might help?
Interesting insights but the sort of terminally online presentation of everything really falls flat and maybe writing sober might help?
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December 22, 2022a harrowing look into the psyche of an instagram meme page admin
June 27, 2023
I want to read this over and over and over.
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