Ally > Recent Status Updates

Mollie Houses were a hush-hush part of society... places where men who were attracted to men, women who were attracted to women, people who weren't either gender, and others of the like frequented. He'd even heard others like him attended. Boys mistaken as girls and vice versa.

[Why is it so very common to fold lesbians and trans men into histories of legal persecution that did not include them?]

"Futures" - A.L. Major: This is the obvious closer given its very lovely vision of a Black trans future as a living elder, even among environmental and economic devastation and failing to achieve all of the world-repair one sets out to do. The rest of the essay didn't make much of an impression on me - mostly generic non-binary journey stuff - but that ending is incredibly beautiful.

"In My Worst Nightmares, My Father Transitions" - Kaia Ball: Loved how this bookended the Addie Tsai essay, both looking at unspoken parental queerness. This one is formally really interesting, ranging between vignette to more extended examination to poetic flight, some really nice craft on display. And wonderfully specific in the emotions it invokes. Perhaps still proxy-fighting with the author's parents too much.

"An Incomplete History of Trans Immortality" - Zeyn Joukhadar: This one was bonkers and I LOVED IT. (And beautifully read with appropriately escalating over-the-top-ness.) Mixes art & saints & Inanna (though 'gala' were referred to as 'galli' - first is Sumerian, second unrelated Romans) & lichen. Gorgeous. Also weirdly precarious for a dude with a PhD, but they spoke enough from 1st-person-plural it was forgivable.

"Gender Euphoria Is a Power Source" - Caro De Robertis: Probably my second-least-favorite essay: wild how the light-skinned upper-class non-binary transmasc professor projects so much more anxiety about the violence & precarity they feel they face than any of the Black trans women.

"All Power to the People" - Raquel Willis: Recounting of a particular protest against Eric Adams, centers on Willis' speech at the event. Bog standard rah rah activist essay (without any juicy reflection on how the event actually came together or how the group conceived of its impact, the parts I'm most interested in as an organizer). She is a badass, though, and somewhere this collection has to talk politics, so ok.

"Lusus Deux" - Autumn Fourkiller: Portrait of a childhood/adolescent PCOS-like hormonal issue. Writing was a bit stunt-y (direct & confrontational reader address, playing with the withholding of information, fragments) & I don't think that had much effect. Was grateful for a representation of this category of experience in this collection though, & I felt for the writer.

"Becoming Femme" - Tanais: Oof, I hated this one, and it felt very long. It gender-essentialismed, bad-poly-ed, and straight-leaning-bi-lesbian-fetishized all the heck over me. Orientalist in the fearless way only a rich brown person from Carbondale, IL could be. Shapeless & directionless in form. Ends with a believable story of how the author drove off all their female friends with pettiness.

"Speaking My Language" - Edgar Gomez: The way Gomez fits the trans/gnc umbrella is subtle & doesn't show up much in this piece - the personal anecdote here is a gay guy cruising in a maybe-not-gay bar reassured by 'latinx' on a sticker. Most of the piece is rehashing the latinx/latin/latine/latin@/latino/hispanic debates at a pretty 101 level, plus a lightning-speed non-specific queer childhood retelling. Meh for me.

"Redemption Slayage" - Denny: Written well but also very baby-trans-feeling, not conscious that many of the presentation pressures discussed here as transfeminine pressures exist for many other people, missing nuance toward the many many different forms & strategies of passing & beauty that exist & their implications. Liked spending time with this writer, though.

"Trick" - Meredith Talusan: another one intended for a trans audience, I really liked this one & the specificity / tenderness / risk with which it treated gender identity. (The sex was read weirdly flatly - not at all like Talusan's reading & writing style! - in the audiobook.) I dunno why I always get jump-scared by Boston-in-a-time-period-I-lived-there showing up but that intensified the experience of this one.

"On Beauty" - Akwaeke Emezi: Short one, exemplifying what I love about Emezi (specific prose for hard-to-name feelings & abstractions) and dislike (just... wrong about the world's mechanics, glorifying of suicidality). Their read of gender is off here IMO - their top surgery didn't make them a freak outside the gender system, it didn't even make them visibly gnc to most given the rest of their presentation.

"The Goddess in the Volcano" - Gabrielle Bellot: I liked this writing style: specific, diaristic. Felt I got to know the writer. A little low-stakes, like, cool, you dropped acid and had some therapeutic breakthroughs, and boo, your mom cut you off relationally, and ok, you visited Hawaii and felt connected to another culture's myths. Not much "so what". Would have been fine but the essay was long for the stakes.

"Femininity Was the Knife I Wielded" - Jonah Wu: A transition 101 essay for a cis audience, but not a bad one.

"Straining Toward Humanity" - Kai Cheng Thom: The most t4t essay so far, a meditation on the cost of the monster or saint mantle, and the inadequacy of monster-reclamation attempts. Like most KCT essays, it's pretty trans-woman-specific, has a little academia envy, and some nuances might be inaccessible if you weren't trans in the 2010s, while being beautiful, incisive, generous-hearted, and full of fresh insight.

"I'm Still Learning" - Miss Peppermint: goes abstracto for a long while describing political dynamics I think most readers are going to be familiar with already. Veers toward the personal but doesn't remain in specifics for long. An essay any supporter of trans rights could have written (except for the mentions of being on Pose). Would have liked to see more risks here.

"Body Type I" - Vanessa Angelica Villarreal: on Dragon Age: Veilguard's nb character & post-GG anti-"woke" discourse. I've been close to these developments & I wasn't impressed with this analysis -- author ignores market forces & funding driving GG-like situations & speaks as if it's all organic & grass-roots. (Also weird focus on picking characters' genitals, which is only in C2077 & BG3, and as a marketing stunt)

"Object Lessons" - Addie Tsai: beautiful, personal mini-gender-memoir plus tribute to author's ambiguously maybe-queer father, nuanced meditations on gender identity acquisition, the binding of culture & gender, heteronormativity in queer relationships, so much else. An essay it both feels like only the author specifically could have written, and which resonated deeply with my own life.

editor's introduction - oh heck yes, this is a good intro: efficient personal & political context, motivation for the collection, warm pointers to individual pieces. standard format but it's alive here.

"Difficult at Parties" - this one is just a mess I think? it's a fairly standard narrator-is-a-sex-creep story (peeping tom, steals a camcorder to nonconsensually make a sex tape, weird about lesbians) with the addition of an offstage traumatic break-in before the start of the action to complicate our feelings about it I guess?

"The Resident" - The twist that this is all an artist's statement is kind of funny? The big reveal of gay torture I didn't find satisfying. Some great moments where the piece leans into the horror of derealization, but it doesn't hang there long. Again some good stuff but long for the material. (The text here suggests possibly the bagginess is intentional, to create disorientation?)

"Eight Bites" - I liked this one - our narrator had a body and a relationship to it, and other people in her life and relationships to them (sort of, the sisters and daughter were highly abstracted). Again kind of under-developed, the story goes mostly where you expect (the final time jump is a nice turn though) after only one move (shed weight takes on its own life).

I chose a mote and traced the path I'd drawn for it, and realized that what I'd drawn is the corn planting dance.

[NPK fertilizer - dragon chemistry is so cool]

"Real Women Have Bodies" - I really liked parts of this one about a disease where women become insubstantial and then attach to beautiful things... still under-baked and baggy though! We get closest so far to having realized characters in this one: both the narrator and the love interest remain blank-slate but there's a boss and a co-worker that start to feel like more than an empty vessel or a stereotype.

“Especially Heinous” - writing in response to the episode titles of the first 12 seasons of SVU is a neat formal device, but, again, it doesn’t really go anywhere and by somewhere in the middle, the author is bored of it. The virtuosity of a puzzle stunt lies in making the thing work!

"Mothers" - the premise here (pretend child of a couple takes on a greater reality to the abused partner after the breakup) has potential, but we learn all of it in the first page or so and there's no real development.

"Inventory" - Liked the trick on this one, a list of encounters is a nice spin on the diary short story. I love the diary form for the degree of elision it allows, which here emphasizes the loneliness and scale of the story by leaving most of it out. A nice rhyme with the experience of a ONS / brief love as in most of these snippets, that can carry a lot of meaning while you only know a tiny part of the other.

"The Husband Stitch" - lots of lovely sentences, could probably have been a quarter the length with the same impact. The "if you are reading this aloud" interludes were a nice trick repeated too often; the other-horror-stories were almost all unnecessary and many were dull, we needed maybe one or two in the beginning. The central conceit is both obvious and makes no sense, which maybe just makes it horror?

Meg-John Barker: transmasc non-binary, white, UK, editor's writing partner, multiple degrees, therapist, disabilities named: autism, fatigue, plurality, hard of hearing, post-traumatic stress.

"Plural, trans, and disabled" - no personal reflection or vulnerability - in a scholarly mode. Defines plural, trans, and disabled in such a way that everyone is all three.

Introduction: transmasc, white, Minnesota, therapist, mid-50s.

Real weird for someone in their mid-50s with multiple degrees and a zillion books to bang on at length about their precarity (opening with: how their extremely faint Italian accent makes their life worthless in the eyes of medical professionals) and "how we survive (if we're lucky) just long enough to offer one another love and community."