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meta-squash · 6 months ago

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Squash's Reading List Year In Review 2024

(I've also posted this on WordPress here, where it might be more readable: https://jesuisgourde.wordpress.com/.../30/readinglist2024/)

Last year I read 92 books. I didn't plan on trying to surpass that number but I did, quite easily. This year I read 116 books. I didn't start off with any specific reading goal, but early on I decided to make it my goal to read more books by not-cis-men (women, trans/nonbinary people, etc) than by cis men. I hit that goal with 72 books. I did want to reread a number of books; I reread 7 books, but not all were the ones I listed in my last yearly reading review. I read 89 fiction books and 27 nonfiction. Of the nonfiction, the genres were mainly biography/autobiography, essay, science, and history. I read 45 books from small press publishers. I read 39 books by and/or about queer people. I don't have a super nice photo spread this year because I read a lot of books at work; I was going to screenshot my goodreads grid but unfortunately they have (frustratingly) changed the format from grid to list in the past week.

Here's a photo of the books I read that I do own, which isn't a whole lot, since I read most of the books at work this year:

I'll do superlatives at the end, here is the list of what I read this year, in chronological order. (Apologies for the random line breaks in the middle of the list, tumblr doesn't like it when you have 50+ lines without breaks)

-The Sorrows Of Young Werther by Johann von Goethe -The Changeling by Joy Williams -Child of God by Cormac McCarthy -Pierrot Mon Ami by Raymond Queneau -The Ghost Network by Kate Disabato -The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan -Richard III by William Shakespeare (reread) -The Recognitions by William Gaddis -A Kestrel For A Knave by Barry Hines -Grief Is The Thing With Feathers by Max Porter -Bluets by Maggie Nelson -The Wild Party by Joseph Moncure March -The Hospital by Ahmed Bouanani -I Love Dick by Chris Kraus -Minor Detail by Adiana Shibli -Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson -Rent Boy by Gary Indiana -One Or Several Deserts by Carter St Hogan -Samedi the Deafness by Jesse Ball -Norma Jean Baker of Troy by Anne Carson -Die My Love by Ariana Harwicz -Missing Person by Patrick Modiano -Petite Fleur by Iosi Havilio -Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi -The Address Book by Sophie Calle -In The Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado -Plastic Jesus by Poppy Z Brite -New Animal by Ella Baxter -The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-In-The-Moon Marigolds by Paul Zindel (play) -Green Girl by Kate Zambrino -Death In Spring by Merce Rodoreda -Harold's End by JT LeRoy (reread) -Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto -Stranger To The Moon by Evelio Rosero -H of H Playbook by Anne Carson -When The Sick Rule The World by Dodie Bellamy -Wittgenstein's Mistress by David Markson -Agua Viva by Clarice Lispector -Not One Day by Anne Garreta -Mauve Desert by Nicole Brossard -Binary Star by Sarah Gerard -Slug and other stories by Megan Milks -Weetzie Bat by Francesca Lia Block (reread) -The Deer by Dashiel Carrera -Mean by Myriam Gurba -Humiliation by Wayne Koestenbaum -The Toaster Project: Or A Heroic Attempt to Build a Simple Electric Appliance from Scratch by Thomas Thwaites -Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts by Claire Donato -Our Wives Under The Sea by Julia Armfield

-Notes on Thoughts and Vision & The Wise Sappho by H.D. -Harrow by Joy Williams -A Feast Of Snakes by Harry Crews -Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York by Lucy Sante -Milkshake by Travis Dahlke -Little Fish by Casey Plett -Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor -Sex Goblin by Lauren Cook -Biography of X by Catherine Lacey -Why Fish Don't Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life by Lulu Miller -Hir by Taylor Mac (play) -Daddy Boy by Emerson Whitney -Notes On Camp by Susan Sontag -Transformer: A Story of Glitter, Glam Rock, and Loving Lou Reed by Simon Doonan -Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo -Acid Snow by Larry Mitchell (reread) -33 1/3 Joy Division - Unknown Pleasures by Chris Ott -The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides -red doc> by Anne Carson -Darryl by Jackie Ess -A Visit From The Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan -The Postman Always Rings Twice by James Cain -Body by Harry Crews -St Sebastian's Abyss by Mark Haber -The Quick & The Dead by Joy Williams (reread) -Don't Think Twice: Adventure and Healing at 100 Miles Per Hour by Barbara Schoichet -Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer -Timbuktu by Paul Auster -Nevada by Imogen Binnie -The End We Start From by Megan Hunte -Organ Meats by K-Ming Chang -Like Flies From Afar by K. Ferraro -Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe -Bestiary by K-Ming Chang -Playboy by Constance Debre -Red Dragon by Thomas Harris -Parting Gifts for Losing Contestants by Jessica Mooney -The Outline of My Lover by Douglas A Martin -Monstrilio by Gerardo Samano Cordova -Essex County by Jeff Lemire (reread) -Tacky: Love Letters to the Worst Culture We Have To Offer by Rax King -The Death of Francis Bacon by Max Porter -Lover Man by Alston Anderson -Cecilia by K-Ming Chang -The Employees by Olga Ravn -It Lasts Forever And Then It's Over by Anne De Marcken -Mercy Killing by Alandra Hileman (play) -Tentacle by Rita Indiana

-Nox by Anne Carson -What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami -McGlue by Ottessa Moshfegh (reread) -Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin -John by Annie Baker (play) -Widow Basquiat by Jennifer Clement -All Down Darkness Wide by Sean Hewitt -The Blue Books by Nicole Brossard -The Book Of Difficult Fruit: Arguments for the Tart, Tender and Unruly by Kate Lebo -Blood Of The Dawn by Claudia Salazar Jimenez -The Balloonists by Eula Biss -Ravage: An Astonishment Of Fire by MacGillivray/Kirsten Norrie -Gods Of Want: Stories by K-Ming Chang -Fem by Magda Carneci -Miss Major Speaks: Conversations with a Black Trans Revolutionary by Miss Major Griffin-Gracy and Toshio Merino -Mr Parker by Michael McKeever (play) -Fucking A by Suzan-Lori Parks (play) -Dictee by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha -Otherspace, a Martian Ty/opography by Brad Freeman and Johanna Drucker

I DNF'ed a few books, but all were put down with the intention of finishing them at some point. Mostly they were books I needed to read when I was less busy/in a different headspace. I DNF'ed: Soldiers Don't Go Mad: A true story of friendship, poetry and mental illness during the first world war by Charles Glass, a reread of Her by HD, and The Apple In The Dark by Clarice Lispector. The Lispector and HD are both modernist novels that need 100% attention, and the Glass book is a nonfiction book (very good so far) that I put down in favor of something that at the time was more interesting.

I gave out a lot of 5 stars this year. The books I rated as 5 stars were: The Changeling by Joy Williams, The Recognitions by William Gaddis, Our Wives Under The Sea by Julia Armfield, 33 1/3 Unknown Pleasures by Chris Ott, Transformer by Simon Doonan, Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo, Body by Harry Crews, Organ Meats by K-Ming Chang, Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe, and Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin.

~Superlatives~

Like last year, I'm going to do runners-up because I read so many books.

Favorite book: The Recognitions by William Gaddis. I have to pick this one as my favorite for the year, because reading it was a journey, and because it was a book that was exactly everything I love in a book: fascinating, very human characters, weird formatting, great dialogue, metaphors galore, and most importantly, hundreds of cultural, artistic, historical, biblical and literary references. I started this book on January 4 and I finished it February 22. It was so unbelievably dense, probably the densest novel I've ever read, and I absolutely loved it. So much is going on in this novel that it's hard for me to summarize. In the very shortest version of a summary, it is a novel about counterfeits (specifically paintings, but counterfeits in all and any forms) and Catholicism in 1930s/40s New York. The main character is a young man named Wyatt Gwyon, a talented artist who instead of painting for himself, becomes a skilled counterfeiter-- not because he wants to make money, but because he's obsessed with the perfection of making exact interpretations of other people's art. He also struggles with religion and belief due to his strange religious upbringing. Many, many other characters are also focal points throughout the novel. The book is unique in that it doesn't use quotation marks when characters speak and rarely uses "he said"/"she said" or any similar phrase. But Gaddis is incredibly talented at writing dialogue so that each character's voice comes through, and it's obvious (except when he doesn't want it to be) who is speaking. Gaddis is also wonderfully scathing, and much of the novel is incredibly witty and intelligent observations about the Modernist art world and artistic spaces in general. The characters are all fascinating, there is a lot of mirroring and metaphors. I say this book is about counterfeits in every form, because it constantly highlights different ways in which each character is faking something, or lying, or pretending to be/know/do/think something they are not. This book was incredible, I annotated every single page and had so much fun reading it, even though or perhaps because it was so unbelievably dense.

Just for a bit of reference, here are a few of the more annotated pages in my copy of The Recognitions:

Runner up: Body by Harry Crews (more on this one further down)

Least favorite book: Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi. I was so disappointed by this book. The blurb on the back made it sound like it was going to be really beautiful and interesting and unique. It wasn't. It was all tell and no show. It follows Ada, a person who is born with one foot in the spirit world. A traumatic experience at university causes her to develop split personalities as the spirits from the other side step forward to protect her from trauma. Unfortunately, the spirits who now control her body have darker, more dangerous desires. Sadly, there was almost no plot, just description after description of Ada's unhealthy relationships and erratic behavior. But because the narrative is so distanced from said relationships and from Ada, the high stakes of this behavior is not felt, not really. Interesting characters can easily save 'all tell and no show type' books, but none of the characters get delved into with any depth, even Ada. The show rather than tell narrative also seriously undermines the poetic prose that crops up almost at random. This book felt flat. No plot, little stakes felt, no interesting characters, tell rather than showing everything, and it's not compelling at all.

Runner up: Playboy by Constance Debre. The back of this book describes it as a memoir detailing the writer's "decision, at age forty-three, to abandon her marriage, her legal career, and her bourgeois Parisian life to become a lesbian and a writer." Which sounds amazing! But it isn't! It's unbelievably pretentious and quite boring. It's mostly just complaining hidden by a facade of faux-philosophical meandering and directionless autobiographical vignettes. The author is a lawyer and she spends most of the time complaining about poor people and about women. It's so hilariously misogynistic. It's just various vignettes of her relationships with various women (who she dislikes and disparages for being femme or having bad bodies or for having lowbrow/uncultured interests etc etc) and then her going and visiting her ex-husband and teenage son, and then complaining that she has nothing. There's little to no emotion in the book, she is not charming, and her pseudo-philosophical musings are boring.

Most surprising/unexpected book: Body by Harry Crews. This book crept up on me in terms of a favorite. Crews' writing is not for everyone, but it's absolutely for me. The book follows bodybuilder Shereel Dupont and her trainer, Russell, who are at the world bodybuilding competition. Shereel has left home to compete over the past year and is now one of the most likely to win. Unfortunately, her family, who are "corpulent rednecks" with odd habits, show up to cheer her on, causing disruption and chaos throughout the hotel at which the competition is held and turmoil for Shereel herself. This book blew me away completely. Every time I thought it had reached a plateau of weirdness and chaos and insanity, it ratcheted that all up even higher, culminating in the most perfectly fucked up ending.

Runner up: Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin. A mother trapped in the liminal space between life and death is made by an unfamiliar changeling child to retell the events of the recent past, desperately trying to pinpoint the moment she can reverse the environmental poisoning of herself and her daughter. I picked this book up because it sounded interesting, and then it ended up being an amazingly written short horror novel. It had a lot of interesting thoughts on motherhood and the horror of being a parent - not in a negative way, but the horror of wanting to protect and keep your child safe and the inability to do so.

Most fun book: Like Flies From Afar by K Ferrari. I fully judged a book by its cover with this one, and it did not disappoint. Small-time criminal/oligarch Mr Machi thinks he's hot shit, until he pops a tire on the way to an appointment and discovers an unidentifiable corpse in his trunk. As he scrambles to deal with the body, his paranoia grows as he tries to calculate who out of all his enemies and employees might be responsible, and who is trying to frame him, and who the body might be, and his life slowly transforms into a nightmare. Everyone in this book is loathsome, but in a way that is so fun to hate. The whole novel is a romp of panic and paranoia, people who think they're so cool and hard exposing how uncool they are, and a mystery that's so fun because watching the protagonist panic is a kind of schadenfreude.

Runner up: Transformer by Simon Doonan. This is a book for people who love Lou Reed, by a man who loves Lou Reed. It's just a wonderfully written biography that focuses mainly on the album Transformer, but also gives Lou Reed's history and is interspersed with stories about Doonan's own thoughts and experiences with Reed. The whole book is really passionate and vivid, and fun to read even if you don't have the album immediately to hand.

Best queer book: Our Wives Under The Sea by Julia Armfield. Leah, a marine biologist, has returned from a deep-sea voyage that went wrong. Her wife Miri begins to realize that something is wrong, and Leah came back changed. The narrative switches between Miri's point of view as she tries to reach Leah and struggles help her despite not knowing what's happening to her wife, and Leah's point of view as she remembers and recounts what happened to her during her submarine voyage. I started this book at work and brought it home. In the middle of reading it, I stopped to finish some task (I think it might have been to make dinner), and ended up having to cut the task short because I needed so badly to keep reading. The most compelling part of the book is the very different ways the two characters' love for each other shines through, even in the darkest moments of the novel.

Runner up: Darryl by Jackie Ess. The titular narrator of this novel discovers that he genuinely enjoys a cuckolding lifestyle, watching men have sex with his wife. But then he realizes that part of the reason he likes it so much, is that maybe he wants to be the wife. His explorations with sex and gender and relationships (and basketball) begin to unravel his marriage and his friendships and his own mind. Then he learns more about one of the men his wife has been sleeping with, and things get dangerous. I loved this book because despite it being written by a trans woman, the story doesn't at all go where you'd expect regarding gender or sexuality. It's satirical, it's witty, it's got some cool things to say about kink and about gender, and it's totally original.

Saddest book: Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo. This is a classic I'd been meaning to read for a long time. The narrator is an American WWI soldier named Joe who was hit by an artillery shell and has woken in the hospital having had his arms and legs amputated, as well as most of his facial features mutilated beyond use/recognition. Trapped in his body, he drifts through memories and musings on life and war and philosophy as he tries to keep track of the days and to figure out some way to communicate with the hospital staff. It's no wonder this book is a classic. The writing is incredible, the imagery vivid and the plot totally gripping, even as it switches between the peaceful past and the horrible present. The end is completely gut-wrenching.

Runner up: Minor Detail by Adania Shibli. This novel explores what in history is a minor detail, and what impact that little moment might have on someone in the future. The first part of the novel opens in Palestine in 1949, in a military camp, where a group of Israeli soldiers (led by a captain suffering from a bite-induced hallucinogenic fever) kidnap, rape, and murder an unnamed Palestinian woman and bury her body in the desert. Fifty-odd years later, a Palestinian writer learns about this "small" moment in history, which occurred 25 years to the day before her birth, and becomes obsessed with learning more. She obtains an illegal pass to the Zone in which the woman died, determined to go there and find more information. I don't want to summarize much more because I don't want to give away any of the hard-hitting plot points. But Minor Detail was published in 2020, and it explores the cycles of violence and the ways in which oppression has not changed for the Palestinian people. It's a book that I wish I had read twice because (as the title suggests) there were a lot of small details that repeated themselves or were less noticeable at first but slowly grew or became important later in the story, and I'm sure I would have noticed more.

Weirdest book: The Changeling by Joy Williams. I love Joy Williams! I love everything she writes! Her themes are always so interesting and her writing style is so unique. The main character, a young woman named Pearl, escapes her terrible marriage by joining a rich older man and in doing so ends up living with him on an island that is populated by children he has taken under his wing. Pearl wants little to do with them and spends most of her days getting drunk by the pool -- the children are eerily smart and her son has joined their games and lessons, and they all want her attention. But her son is less and less her son as time goes on, and the children are not always the children, and the adults in the house are all bizarre and half-mad. I wish I could give a better summary, but Joy Williams books are always difficult to summarize, because so much of the stories are less about the plot and more about the characters just feeling things at the reader, and the plot is often built on or around odd occurrences and philosophical musings. This book blew me away with its imagery and its metaphors. I want to reread it, because it was just so amazing. My absolutely favorite thing about Joy Williams (and this is true for all of her books) is the way she writes these incredibly profound and philosophical phrases like they're nothing at all, like they're so easy, just breezes on by them even though she's just punched you in the chest. It's amazing.

Runner up: Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin.

Most gripping book: Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe. This book is an absolute masterclass in pacing. It tells just a few fragments out of the whole history of the Irish Troubles, but the fragments that are focused on are woven together with brilliant timing, humanizing and vivid portrayals, fantastic analysis and contextualization, and altogether excellent writing. Every time I put this book down I wanted to keep reading, to know what was going to happen next. The book has 3 focal points: Gerry Adams, (alleged) leader of the IRA; Dolors Price, a member of the IRA; and the family of Jean McConville, a woman kidnapped by the IRA. At first, all three storylines are disparate, but Keefe slowly weaves them together, pulling all the threads of context and action and years in prison or government or delinquent schools together slowly but steadily. The book reads like a thriller, and I adored it completely. (Yes, I do know about the miniseries. I haven't finished watching it yet!)

Runner up: Our Wives Under The Sea by Julia Armfield.

Book that taught me the most: Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe

Runner up: The Toaster Project: Or A Heroic Attempt to Build a Simple Electric Appliance from Scratch by Thomas Thwaites. This could also go under weirdest book, easily. As a graduate art school project, Thwaites decided to attempt to build the simplest (and cheapest) appliance he could think of - a toaster - fully from scratch. Quite literally, starting with mining the elements to make the right kinds of metal and figuring out how to make the right kind of plastic. Half of the book is Thwaites' attempts to build various elements of a toaster - and how they go wrong, or right, and why it's so hard. The other half discusses all the processes that go in to making all these elements in a more manufactured setting, their impact on the environment and the economy, and the difference between cheap mass-produced products that break down vs more expensive products that last longer. The writing was fun and included photos and diagrams and interviews with various industry professionals Thwaites contacted to learn more.

Most interesting/thought provoking book: The Recognitions by William Gaddis

Runner up: Organ Meats by K-Ming Chang. I've now read everything this author has published and this is by far her best book. Her narrative style is so unique and so poetic, and the themes she always comes back to are so interesting, and they culminate in this amazing novel. This magical realist novel centers around two best friends, Anita and Rainie, who are both first generation Taiwanese-American. The story opens when they are adolescents, and Anita has recently learned that they come from generations of dog-headed women and women-headed dogs. They vow to become dogs together, tying a string around each other's throats as collars and playing at dogs in the empty lot near their apartment complex. But Anita's dreamlike imagination and obsessively loyal personality starts to clash with Rainie's more reserved nature, and when it becomes too much, Rainie's family moves away. Rainie grows up, while unbeknownst to her, Anita has sunk into a dreamworld and her body has begun to rot. She narrates her family's past and her mother's bloodline because she cannot narrate her own present. When she returns to the town she grew up in, Rainie discovers Anita's condition, and knows that she is the only one who can save her. This novel is beautiful, incredibly poetic, and experiments with formatting and narration in really unique ways. Its exploration of friendship and queerness and obsession and tradition and folklore is absolutely fascinating. I often write in my books and underline sentences or paragraphs that I really love. I didn't write in this one, because I would have ended up underlining the entire novel.

Longest/shortest book: My longest book was The Recognitions by William Gaddis at 952 pages, and my shortest was Notes On Camp by Susan Sontag at 57 pages.

General thoughts on all the other books that didn't get superlatives:

-Child of God by Cormac McCarthy. This is the first McCarthy book I've ever read (I know, I know) and I really enjoyed it. You just watch a horrible guy walk around in the rural countryside of a small town, doing increasingly fucked up things and committing various awful crimes. Which is exactly up my alley in terms of literature. The main character, Ballard, is someone who is so weird and pathetic that he becomes turned inside out into evilness. You feel sorry for him but you also hate him and he's also fascinating because he's so fucking weird. It's a great book.

-The Ghost Network by Catie Disabato. This book was so much fun to read while living in Chicago. It's a rock n roll mystery novel that riffs on Situationism and the L tracks and maps. A rock star disappears, and the main character who is a fan of her's is determined to find out what happened to her. What she uncovers is a series of clues based on defunct lines and stations of the Chicago transit system, and the Situationist concept of detournment, which lead her towards finding out what actually happened to the rock star. This book was so much fun, and so much of it was based on real life defunct train lines and the actual Situationists, both of which I found really interesting. The ending was also just so good! Somehow I managed to have read everything I needed to in order to get every single reference in the book, which was really surprising to me, because they all came from different places.

-New Animal by Ella Baxter. This book baffled me. It is about a woman who works as a makeup-artist at her family's morgue. When her mother dies unexpectedly, she skips the funeral and goes to stay at her estranged father's house. While there, trying to figure out how to vent her grief, she decides to try out the local kink scene. Her first experience is with a dom who is a manipulative, horrible asshole. She has a bad time, but wants to try again, so she goes to a place that hosts scenes. She acts like she knows what she's doing when she doesn't, no one gives her any instruction, so she fucks up massively, and everyone has a bad time. It's the worst portrayal of the kink scene I think I've ever encountered. The author said she did a lot of research but it just seems like a lot of terrible assumptions and misinterpretations. I thought it was going to be a book that positively portrayed kink and people who like the kink scene, but it's very much not. It didn't even feel like the author was doing this so the character would learn that she can't run from her grief. It seemed more like the author had one bad experience due to poor communication or shitty individuals, and then decided that's what the whole scene was like.

-Harold's End by JT LeRoy. I read this book in high school (or perhaps just after graduating) and totally fell in love with it, and then never saw another copy until recently. It was so good to reread it, to re-experience the gorgeous watercolor portraits that come with it. The novel follows a young street kid/hustler who lives with other street kids; all his friends have pets but he doesn't. A john takes a liking to him and buys him a snail as a pet, who he names Harold. The book follows him as he lives on the streets and as his relationship with the john develops. The book is classic JT LeRoy, and the end is LeRoy's usual style of characters experiencing a life lesson and growth but not necessarily in a happy way. It definitely holds up!

-Wittgenstein's Mistress by David Markson. This was such a fun and weird book and I really enjoyed it. Markson's idea for the novel was "what if someone actually lived the way that Wittgenstein's Tractatus suggests?". What we get is a woman who believes she is the last person on earth (it is never confirmed whether this is true or not). She muses on life, culture, art, philosophy, and her past, and discusses her trips across the world despite its emptiness. But her story changes constantly; she's always referencing things she said before and editing herself. It's a weird, fun, fascinating novel with a lovably weird main character.

-A Feast Of Snakes by Harry Crews. Yet another fucked up book that I loved. It follows Joe Lon Mackey, a former high school football star that now lives a dead-end life in his hometown in Georgia. Each year the town hosts the Rattlesnake Roundup, where people come from many states away to try and catch as many rattlesnakes as they can in order to win a competition. Joe Lon is in charge of the event now that his father is too old and ill. He's uncomfortably self-aware of his own personal failings and his inadequacy and his abusive relationship with his wife; he'd rather not think about any of it and is incapable of figuring out how to change things. But his old girlfriend is returning for the event, and his father's attempts to control the goings-on from afar mean he's unable to stop thinking about where his life has ended up and where it's going. All this drives him slowly crazy with desperation until the insane ending. Crews is incredibly talented at writing characters that are likeable despite being so flawed and fairly awful people. This book is no exception.

-Milkshake by Travis Dahlke. What a weird novel! In a near-future dystopian heatwave, an 11 year old girl escapes the environmental catastrophe by traveling back in time to her past life as a fertilizer salesman whose marriage is slowly collapsing. I really enjoyed it, because it was just so odd. Now that I'm thinking about it, I feel as though it would have been really interesting to read just before or just after reading Tentacle; both books focus specifically on time travel and on environmental disaster.

-Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor. At the opening of the box, a Witch has been murdered in a small village in Mexico called La Matosa. The rest of the chapters are narrated by different characters, who all have some small or large hand in the death of the Witch, who was a woman who the whole town visited in secret for medicine, fortune-tellings, and advice. The narrating characters include a schoolgirl, a drug dealer, a prostitute, a hapless husband who wants to make something of himself, and a teenager in love with his young girlfriend. With each narration we learn more about the Witch, and her mother who was a Witch before her. Slowly, we get inklings of the nature of the murder, and the revelation at the end is brutal. Melchor's writing is incredibly vivid, and the characters are all caught in the cycle of poverty, driven by superstition and fear and hardship. None of the characters are likeable, but they're all so human.

-Biography Of X by Catherine Lacey. In a dystopic alternate-universe US, where the Southern Territory split from the North after WWII and established a fascist theocracy, a woman named CM grieves her recently deceased wife X, who was a famous artist. Despite X's wishes, CM decides to delve into her wife's past, researching her history before they met and before she was known as X. She uses her credentials and privileges as a journalist to cross into the Southern Territory and learn about X's family and the communities from which she came, her activism and her hidden lives, and begins to realize that maybe learning all this about the woman she loved won't benefit her in the long run and that maybe their relationship wasn't as rosy as she thought. This novel combined fiction and real life in really fascinating ways, and includes both real and fake sources in its footnotes.

-The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides. A famous and successful painter murders her husband and then refuses to speak. A psychologist who is also a fan of her work is determined to get her to speak again. Obsessed with uncovering the truth, he ends up taking risks that threaten himself and his patient. A fun mystery that went down easy. It didn't attempt to be too realistic from the start, so suspension of disbelief wasn't hard. I do think the book could have done without the entire last part. Leaving it on the realization of what had happened and allowing the reader to sit with that realization (especially with how creatively the twist is presented) would have had more impact I think than the slower and less engaging denouement of the last 3 chapters, which were far weaker than the rest of the book.

-Acid Snow by Larry Mitchell. I reread this book for the first time since about 2009 and really enjoyed it. It's a very sad novel about a man living in NYC during the height of the AIDS epidemic. Most of his friends and lovers have died and he's scared and sad about his own life and cynical about love, but he's attracted to the man who owns the shop below his apartment. It's a dark book, sad and scared and jaded. I think the main character's anxiety and grief that slowly escalates into paranoia is an amazingly surreal way to portray all the emotions that consumed the queer community at that time. I also loved the sort of lack of closure at the end - because many people didn't get that.

-Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer. I don't generally go for science fiction novels, but I read this one because so many people said they had liked it. I really enjoyed it. The unnamed narrator, a biologist, is part of an all-female expedition into a harsh, unknown territory that has appeared adjacent to the US. The suspense and strangeness of the novel had excellent pacing. The descriptions were also so vivid and clear, which made the story's weirdness so compelling. I loved watching the main character struggle to remain objective the whole time while knowing that she's failing. Her growing fascination and terror is so fun to read as each feeling tries to overtake the other. I also think it was great as a standalone and I feel no interest in reading the other books in the same universe.

-Nevada by Imogen Binnie. I'm a bad queer person, I hated this book. In it, the narrator, a trans woman, is frustrated with her life and has just broken up with her girlfriend, so she steals her ex's car and drives away, ending up in a small town where she spends the night with a department store employee. I just really don't like books that are meandering tell and no show without characters or a plot that are interesting. This entire book felt like someone recounting their weekend over breakfast, complete with casual informal language and overuse of the word "like". Which would be fine if any of the characters were compelling, or if the plot was really interesting and went somewhere, but it didn't. A good portion of it is just musings on New York City, but without the creativity or vividness that other portrayals of NYC have to offer. After I read it, I learned this book was kind of the catalyst for a specific style of trans writing. Which also explains why I hated Detransition, Baby when I read it a couple years ago, as it's a sort of literary descendant of this. I'm happy to read books that are tell rather than show....so long as something interesting happens or at least one of the characters is unique and compelling. This book sadly has neither.

-Essex County by Jeff Lemire. I read this for an English class in university, so this was a reread and I really enjoyed reading it a second time! All the stories in this collection are so beautiful and compelling, all the characters are so real. And the art style is fantastic. The stories revolve around characters living in the titular Essex County in Canada, across a number of generations. It weaves together their relationships and their lives, much of which revolves around hockey. There were some storylines I remembered quite well and others I didn't remember at all, so it was really nice to revisit this one.

-Ravage: An Astonishment of Fire by MacGillivray. Man, this book had so much potential. This novel is a fake biography of a fake poet who disappeared from a Scottish island in the 1960s after falling into delusions that he has become a demon. The fascinating thing about this book (at first), is that it's completely convinced that it is an actual nonfiction book. It gives no hints that it's fake, and the first 50 pages are convincingly written with an academic, nonfiction voice as the novel is utterly convinced of its own delusion of factualness. The novel claims to be an analysis of found papers: first, the poetry and written tracts of Tristjan Norge, a Norwegian poet, then the analysis of his works by MacGillivray, and finally, the diary of his companion Luce Montcrieff. Unfortunately, it is fairly repetitive in a way that bogs the reader down quite a bit. Even so, I think I would have enjoyed much, much more if the ending did not abruptly switch genres to a supernatural/fantasy novel in a way that was startling and had no previous indications of earlier in the book. Up to the last 20 pages I thought it was interesting, even when it was dense, but the end felt like the author didn't know how to end the novel and just used the deus ex machina of supernatural occurrences.

My goal for 2025 is to read majority nonfiction. I don't know if I'm going to actually meet that goal, but I'll try. I don't have any goals for how many books I want to read, especially because I tend to read nonfiction quite a bit slower than fiction, so I don't have a good idea of what my reading amount goal should actually be. This year I also forgot entirely about my attempt to read all of Jean Genet's (translated) works, so I will hopefully actually meet that goal in 2025, since I only have one or two books left to read. But my first three books of the year are going to be Soldiers Don't Go Mad by Charles Glass, which I started this year but didn't finish, The Declared Enemy: Texts and Interviews by Jean Genet, and Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks by Patrick Radden Keefe.

#reading list #reading list year in review #book list #book list year in review #book recommendations #reading #books

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armorabs · 1 year ago

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BOY HOWDY DO I!!!

spongebob is genderfluid, usually prefers he/him even when he's girlmoding but sometimes she does like to indulge in a little she/hering when she feels up to it.

squidward is a gnc trans man. didnt start socially transitioning until he was in high school, and his baldness is a side-effect of going on t once he was an adult. wasn't comfortable with feminine presentation until after he'd gotten top surgery, and does periodically present femininely afterwards. (see: his bras and skirts in a few episodes)

patrick is a binary trans man. generally doesn't like presenting femininely and actively resents it if he ever needs to (see: patricia) he hasn't experienced any unwanted side-effects from t, and his baldness is just because he shaves his hair for gender euphoria masculinity-asserting reasons. can and sometimes does grow his hair out though.

sandy is a flavor of nonbinary woman - thinking maybe demigirl or something. isnt completely disconnected from womanhood but does feel isolated from it because of the way she views herself as just Fundamentally Different From Girls She Grew Up With (in a lesbian way)(she identifies more with being a lesbian than with being a woman bc of it)

mrs. puff i can honestly vibe with any gender headcanon for given her relationship with identity in several episodes. i can see her being a trans woman i can see her being a cis woman, and i can even see her being some flavor of transmasculine, it all makes perfect sense for her lmao

plankton is also a binary trans man, butttt its also a little complicated. doesn't mind presenting as his agab or using his deadname if he thinks he can benefit from it in some way but also doesn't like being seen as cute or feminine unless under extremely specific circumstances that he has complete control over. legally changed his name to sheldon as soon as he turned 18 and is embarrassed by the specific name choice now that he's in his 40s. still likes being sheldon enough he hasnt legally changed it again though.

karen is a. (giggles) heh. binary trans woman. both literally and metaphorically. was once thought to be a male calculator but has since transitioned into a female wifeomatic computer.

larry i usually see as a cisgender man but sometimes i vibe with him being a trans guy i dont know i like both ideas for him.

krabs is some flavor of gnc - likes being a man, also likes being beautiful, but not necessarily feminine. except sometimes, but not always.

i like the idea of pearl also being a trans girl, i dont necessarily think its has basis in canon like the rest here butttt its a sweet idea i think

Okay, I'm trying real hard to get the gears in my head to turn this week, but I think I might be short on grease.

Anyone here have any genuine SpongeBob trans/enby headcanons they'd wanna share? I swear I'm close to a breakthrough, there's plenty I can say about attraction headcanons but that's as far as i'm getting at this time lol

***People who don't approve of this discussion, please don't interact. Headcanons are supposed to be fun personal interpretations, and I'm almost certain there are people more involved in the tumblr SpongeBob fandom that would love to have the floor and discuss their ideas. If this makes you uncomfortable, I 1000% don't mind if you have to block me, it's no skin off my nose.

#spongecanons #hiiii. i like having genuine sb headcanons.

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ao3feed-larry · 2 years ago

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And there are stars that we know nothing about

by loha28

There is no one on the face of the earth more convincing than Zayn Malik, Louis is sure of it. No other soul would ever be able to drag Louis somewhere he doesn’t really want to be, except his (unfortunate) best friend.

Zayn has a work party where everyone must bring someone along that no one else from the office has met. Naturally, Zayn must drag Louis along. Where he meets one Niall Horan who brought his personal trainer and friend along, and he happens to be the most gorgeous person inside and out that Louis has ever met.

They happen to fall in love.

Words: 8059, Chapters: 1/1, Language: English

Series: Part 7 of Larry Stylinson One Shots and Shorts

Fandoms: One Direction (Band)

Rating: General Audiences

Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply

Categories: M/M

Characters: the wonderful, Niall Horan, Oli Wright, Original Characters, also featuring - Character, and - Character, Azari - freeform - Character, Original Styles-Tomlinson Child(ren), Max - freeform - Character, Rose - Freeform - Character, Yelena - freeform - Character, i actually have no clue what freeform means lmao

Relationships: Harry Styles/Louis Tomlinson, Zayn Malik/Original Nonbinary Character(s)

Additional Tags: Strangers to Lovers, they meet at a, Party, its not vital but, Mechanic Louis Tomlinson, Personal Trainer Harry Styles, Fluff, No Smut, Implied Sexual Content, No Angst, i truly cant write angst, and post it, Meet-Cute, i guess?, Lion King (1994) References, dont ask, Boys Kissing, In a park, again dont ask its cute, Mutual Pining, Louis Tomlinson Calls Harry Styles Pet Names, I love that tag, zayn has a nonbinary partner because i will add trans rep everywhere, you cant stop me, Pansexual Zayn Malik, its not mentioned im just happy thats a tag, Holding Hands, i make attempts at, Humor, Fluff and Humor, theyre definitely awful, i love tagging can you tell?, First Dates, i got this idea from a tiktok, once again do not ask, Time Skips, to years afterwards

via AO3 works tagged 'Harry Styles/Louis Tomlinson' https://ift.tt/LaYInW0

#larry stylinson #larry fic #ao3 feed larry #And there are stars that we know nothing about #<p>by <a r

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jlf23tumble · 6 years ago

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Hi! I'm the girl direction anon, i just finished reading the fics and i just wanted to say thank you so much!! They were amazing! I loved all of objectlesson's fics! so great! one of my favourite authors for sure! Also you were right, reading about all this body positivity was so nice! it's way better than what the 'media' is trying to do now because it feels genuine and real! Really loved it! I was wondering if you have any recs with nonbinary/genderfluid characters? It's nice seeing those too

Omg, that’s the sweetest thing ever, I passed along your kind words, and she sends you oodles of love back! I absolutely *do* have some great fic recs for you...it’s a slightly tricky request in that having, say, a story with Harry in panties doesn’t in and of itself mean he’s a genderfluid character in it, but I think I know what you’re getting at, and I’ve definitely got you covered. Some of my very fave fics fall into this category, actually, which means this is gonna be kind of long, so under the cut we go...fingers crossed you haven’t read them all yet!

“Hush.,” by @wankerville, 41k words (E). “I don't like you like that, Harry.” “See,” Harry starts, Louis can hear the smile in his voice, “that's where I think you're lying.” An American high school AU where small towns suck, louis is losing it, and harry’s just too perfect. (This is right up there in my top five all-time fave fics, it’s just luminous, goddd, required reading; the author also wrote the strawberry milk series, which is similarly achingly good, but it has some heavier, abuse-related themes that could be triggering)

“Grenadine Sunshine,” by objectlesson/@alienfuckeronmain, 18k words (E). He wants to taste the faint, sugary ghost of lip gloss, he wants to cup Harry’s face between his palms and swipe the shimmery wet shadows from beneath his eyes. He wants to show him everything he knows, even though he doesn’t know anything about this, about kissing boys or flirting with them or doing their makeup or even showing them it’s okay to want to wear makeup in the first place. (Phoenix wrote this story as an homage of sorts for Wankerville, and it’s a beautiful one of acceptance, love, and support)

“Chapter 4: Braids,” by objectlesson, 14.9k words (E). Timestamp for Grenadine Sunshine. (Part of a larger drabble collection, but a direct relation to the story above)

“Vinyl and Lace,” by objectlesson, 7.5k words, (E). Harry tries on a skirt in the X Factor dressing room as a joke. Louis doesn't think it's very funny. (While we’re hanging out with Phoenix, lol, an underrated beaut!)

“Are You Gonna Be My Girl?” by loadedgunn, 7.5k words (E). "You…" Harry touches his own mouth, teasing. "You ate her pussy?" "Yeah." Louis stops playing with Harry's cock and gropes his arse again, pulling his cheeks apart and pushing them back together over the thong. "Want me to eat yours?" Louis reenacts his first time, and Harry wants to be his good girl. (another one in my top five all-time faves, I’m always amazed at how “short” it is because JESUS, it’s so good, so complete, so beautifully characterized and written from beginning to end, LoadedGunn’s best work, come fight me)

“genderfluid!harry verse,” by istajmaal, 33.9k words (E). harry is a girl sometimes. louis loves her all the time. (This three-part series is old but GOLD, god, the characterization in this one...plus, this author is my hero for writing it in 2013, and I go back to it all the time)

“Nothing You Can Do (But You Can Learn How to Be You in Time),” by Teumessian, 28k words (E; needs ao3 account). Louis braids Harry’s hair. There are good times, bad times, fancy houses, supportive bandmates, secret boyfriends, small rebellions, bigger revolutions, some nail varnish, ribbons, cute clothing, and a Pinterest. (Awwww, the pinterest fic, one of my faves to rec, this author had me with the way they described Louis pushing up his glasses after a particularly difficult braid)

“She Feels So Good,” by Zedi, 4k words (E). That’s the voice that comes out when Harry’s in a skirt, nails done and gestures soft and flirty. That’s the voice Louis is a sucker for every time, even now when it’s coming from a prerecorded segment playing off a monitor. That’s Louis’ good girl. (A look at the Late Late Show appearance, and I love the way this authors switches pronouns when Harry switches gender)

“Warm Glow That Lingers On,” by Blake/@newleafover, 8.5k words (E). If Harry wants his nails painted red, he's got to earn it first. (It’s Blake, nuff said...god, I miss their writing in this fandom)

“it’s you i want to take apart,” by orphan_account, 6k words (E). He will readily admit that he likes to make Harry squirm sometimes, but this actually isn't about that—he just wants to help him get past whatever issue he has here. And, okay, he also really wants to see what Harry would look like with lipstick on, because he bets it would be really pretty. (Read the author’s notes about the inspo on this one...2012!!!! Wow!)

“weird honey,” by orphan_account, 5.4k words (E). They fuck, kind of a lot. It started out as just something to do, to wind down or pass time. Now they do it at least once a week, and Harry’s not sure if that means something. It’s not as if they only fuck each other, but-But there’s no one else Harry could imagine bringing this to. (PWP where Harry is not 100% at home in his body and he and Louis use a sex toy to help work through the problem.)

“I wanna see the way you move for me baby,” by Tomlinsontoes, 3.3k words (M). Louis walks in on Harry all dolled up. (LBD is literally about Harry, and this author...and a lot of others...knew it all the way back then)

“if they find out, will it all go wrong?” by blankiehxrry, 3.4k words (NR). Madison square garden shenanigans. (This one’s from a long time ago, part of a series where the author explores a bunch of things, and here, Harry has a panic attack, and Louis helps him out)

@vondrostes writes AMAZING genderfluid/trans Harry, usually in a variety of pairings; I’ll put the h/l ones here, but go check out his work...especially the newer stuff from hs1, god, it’s so good!!

Made of Lightning, liam/harry, louis/harry, liam/louis/harry, Harry has a secret that could tear the band apart if the truth came out. But keeping it might be even worse.

Wait and See, lots of harry pairings, Cara and Harry are trans, “I’m just—” Harry said, pausing to smooth out the wrinkles in her skirt. “I’m nervous,” she admitted. Cara reached out to tug at the hem of her skirt, guiding her over until she was stood between his legs. He pulled her down for a quick kiss, not wanting to mess up her makeup. “You look perfect,” he reassured her.

Second Spring, harry/louis, a continuation of the Pussy Pride drabbles from June, an expanded series of an American Larry AU where Harry is trans (it is SO GOOD AND GRAPHIC AND THOSE DRABBLES KILLED ME, I CANNOT WAIT FOR THIS SERIES TO FINISH SO I CAN RANDOMLY REBLOG IT ALWAYS)

And finally, dear anon, this is not at all part of the previous list, but it’s all about body appreciation/worship, so I figured you’d enjoy! “I Can’t Hear You,” by kikikryslee, 9k words (E). The one where Harry is self-conscious about his body because it's not the 'typical omega body' and Louis shows him why he loves that.

#fic rec #genderfluid harry #trans harry #there are so many great ones out there you guys #and i'm sad anew about how many great writers have left this fandom #Anonymous

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trans-advice · 6 years ago

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this article has been copied & pasted in its entirety in case there’s a paywall. however, please try to read the article from the link first so that the journalist & newspaper staff get their wages. thank you.

April 28, 2019, 3:11 AM CDT By Alex Berg

The first time JayCee Cooper walked out onto the platform at a women’s powerlifting competition, everything else fell away: her years-long internal struggle over her gender identity, her decision to leave men’s sports when she began transitioning, her doubts that she would ever feel safe if she returned to competitions.

When she stepped out in front of a hundred people in the gym in Fort Collins, Colorado, last September, all she focused on was the barbell, which she hoisted off the ground. And then she heard the cheers of the crowd: “Come on JayCee!” She had found not only a sport, but also a home.

“In a world that wants to take away our power and strength,” Cooper, 31, said recently by phone from her home in Minneapolis, “powerlifting is a way to gain that strength back and feel powerful and feel ownership of our own lives. It helps us find strength within ourselves and helps us find strength within our bodies.”

Cooper signed up for more competitions, but, to her astonishment, USA Powerlifting, the sport’s biggest federation, told her that she could not compete in the women’s division because of her gender identity.

In an email, USA Powerlifting said she was denied because she had a “direct competitive advantage” over the other women who were competing.

“It took me aback,” Cooper said. “I didn’t want to put myself into a situation where I obviously wasn’t welcome.”

Cooper’s story received national attention after she posted about it on Instagram in January. She drew support from fellow powerlifters and Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., who slammed the ban on transgender women competitors as “discriminatory” and “unscientific.”

It was just the latest in a growing number of battles over the place of transgender women athletes in competitive sports.

As transgender women have become more visible and sought to participate in women’s sports, athletic organizing bodies have grappled with how to respond, and critics of their inclusion have grown increasingly vocal, as well.

In March, tennis legend Martina Navratilova apologized for calling trans women “cheats” in a Sunday Times op-ed in which she wrote that “letting men compete as women simply if they change their name and take hormones is unfair.” Weeks later, marathoner Paula Radcliffe told BBC Sport that it would be “naive” not to institute rules. In an interview with Sky News in April, Radcliffe said that if trans people were permitted to compete without regulations, it would be “the death of women’s sport.”

For transgender people watching this issue play out, the debate — often based more in bias and assumptions than in science — is dehumanizing. Those who seek to exclude transgender women from sports sometimes imply that the athletes are adopting their identity to gain an edge in competition, a suggestion many find offensive.

“They don’t understand what it means to be a trans person,” Chris Mosier, a competitive runner and cycler and the first known transgender athlete to make a men’s U.S. national team, said.

“The folks who are improperly reporting on this are making it seem like cis men are pretending to be women to dominate sports,” he added, referring to people who are assigned male at birth and identify as men. “I can say that the amount of discrimination, harassment and challenges trans people face in their everyday lives would never be offset by glory.”

‘IT’S BEEN A ROLLER-COASTER’

Before becoming a powerlifter, Cooper lifted weights as part of her training for other sports. As a teenager growing up in Clarkston, Michigan, she was on the U.S. junior national curling team, competed in track and field in high school and rowed in college.

But she never felt fully comfortable on those all-boys teams.

“It’s been a roller-coaster,” Cooper said. “One of the reasons I stepped away from curling was that I wasn’t being my authentic self, and I was super depressed, and I needed some time away to figure out what that meant for me.”

Four years ago, she began hormone replacement therapy as part of her transition. She now identifies as transfeminine, which she sees as a more expansive identity than simply female.

Cooper first came across powerlifting in high school, but didn’t decide to compete until last year while recuperating from a broken ankle, and she was struck by the sport’s simplicity and supportive atmosphere. In powerlifting, athletes are divided into categories by sex, age and weight, and they compete in three types of lifts: squat, bench press and deadlift. Each movement is a test of static strength, force and focus.

“The barbell for me has been a very empowering way to be in my body, which is politicized every waking second, connect with it, and feel like I’m achieving something,” Cooper said.

“It’s a very almost spiritual feeling in the sense that I’m carrying all of this trauma with me and I’m literally focusing all of that into the barbell. In that moment, I get to control what’s going on.”

To lower her testosterone levels, Cooper takes spironolactone, a drug that is also used to treat high blood pressure and can mask steroid use.

USA Powerlifting, which follows rules set by the World Anti-Doping Agency, requires athletes to apply for an exemption to compete while taking the drug. The group has granted exemptions to powerlifters who have taken spironolactone to treat acne or polycystic ovary syndrome, Larry Maile, USA Powerlifting’s president, said.

As part of her medication exemption application, Cooper provided documentation that her testosterone levels have remained under the International Olympic Committee’s accepted limit for two years. (USA Powerlifting falls under the International Powerlifting Federation, which adopted the IOC’s guidelines that allow transgender women to compete in women’s divisions provided their testosterone is below 10 nmol/L for at least 12 months.)

But in December, Cooper’s exemption request was denied. She was told she could not compete in the women’s division of powerlifting because she had a “competitive advantage” as a transgender woman, according to an email exchange obtained by NBC News between Cooper and Dr. Kristopher Hunt, the chair of USA Powerlifting’s committee that reviews applications for medical exemptions.

"Male-to-female transgenders are not allowed to compete as females in our static strength sport as it is a direct competitive advantage,” Hunt said in one email to Cooper.

Pressed for clarification, he wrote a follow-up. “The fact that transgender male to female individuals having gone through male puberty confer an unfair competitive advantage over non-transgender females,” he said.

In a phone interview, Maile defended the decision and said the organization’s policy of barring transgender women — as well as transgender men who take testosterone — was not new, though it was not posted on USA Powerlifting’s website until this winter after Cooper applied for the exemption. Maile said that the IOC’s guidelines ultimately give organizations the discretion to make their own decisions about fair play. To reach the decision, he said USA Powerlifting researched the physical differences between men and women in terms of muscle density, connective tissue and frame shape.

“We’ve been referred to as bigoted and transphobic and a whole lot of less kind things, but it’s not an issue of that for us,” Maile said. “It’s an issue that we have to consider dispassionately and make our best judgment collectively about what the impact on fair play is for us, and that’s the basis on which we’ve proceeded.”

He added that powerlifting “is really unique, because we’re a high strength and low technique sport” — so the physiology of the competitors is particularly important.

Cooper doesn’t buy that argument, noting that women’s bodies come in all shapes and sizes, which may confer advantages for different sports.

“You look at a WNBA player, they’re pushing 6 feet versus someone doing gymnastics who’s 5 feet tall,” she said. “Their bodies are built completely differently. That’s what sports are about.”

‘THE SCIENCE IS IN ITS INFANCY’

The policies governing transgender athletes vary by sport.

The NCAA has policies similar to the International Olympic Committee and does not require athletes to undergo gender-confirming surgery, while USA Gymnastics does require it under some circumstances, according to research compiled by TransAthlete, a database of professional, recreational, college and K-12 sports’ policies on trans athletes.

Others aim to be more inclusive. USA Hockey, for example, offers options for nonbinary athletes who do not identify as male or female, as well as guidance for trans athletes.

While opponents of inclusion point to the “bigger, faster, stronger” argument as the basis of their fear that transgender women are taking over women’s sports, there are few examples of trans women who’ve excelled at a national or world level, according to Cyd Zeigler, co-founder of OutSports, an outlet that reports on LGBTQ athletes.

The scientific research on transgender athletes is in the early stages, and there is disagreement among experts about how to determine fair rules of competitions.

“There’s no simple or even complex biological test you can apply that tells you who’s a man and who’s a woman,” Roger Pielke Jr., director of the Sports Governance Center at the University of Colorado, said.

In the absence of such a test, testosterone levels are often used as a proxy to determine whether trans women are eligible to compete in women’s leagues. There is evidence that transgender women who are on hormone therapy have lower muscle mass and less aerobic ability than they did before, said Joanna Harper, a scientist who studies gender-diverse athletes and advises the International Olympic Committee. In a 2015 study she published on trans women who are distance runners, Harper, who is a trans woman and runner herself, found that after being on hormone therapy the women were running more than 10 percent slower.

But testosterone is an imperfect metric. Even among cisgender men and women, there is variance in the amount that is considered normal.

To deny Cooper “the right to compete based on ridiculous fear is completely unfounded,” Harper said.

‘TRANS LIFTERS BELONG HERE’

At the Minnesota State Championship in February — a USA Powerlifting meet where Cooper hoped to compete — almost a dozen athletes and 20 people in the audience protested her exclusion, according to Maxwell Poessnecker, a transmasculine-identified lifter from Saint Paul, Minnesota. Flanked by signs and wearing T-shirts that said, “I support trans lifters” and “trans lifters belong here,” the athletes stood on the lifting platform without competing to show their disapproval of the policy, Poessnecker said.

From little leagues to the Olympics, questions over transgender inclusion will continue to surface. Advocates who say concerns about “competitive fairness” are often rooted in gender stereotypes and scientific research is lacking believe policies should be as inclusive as possible.

“It’s hard to call anything model when it requires an individual to be tested and questioned,” said Breanna Diaz, a powerlifter and co-director of Pull for Pride, a charity deadlifting event that benefits homeless LGBTQ youth. If athletes “have a sincerely held gender identity, that should be sufficient,” she said.

Cooper, who co-directs Pull for Pride, hopes to use her experience with powerlifting as a way to drive the conversation about trans athletes.

On May 9, USA Powerlifting’s national governing body will meet to discuss its transgender inclusion policy.

“I really do love this sport,” Cooper said, “and it’s not fair to genetically eliminate an entire group of people.”

#this article has been copied & pasted in its entirety in case of a paywall or a future removal. please click the link so they get revenue

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stonermurphy · 8 years ago

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*kicks down door* You should talk to me about NB Connor because NB Connor is the best.

um yes of course i’ll talk about my fave NB kid in the world??

ahjdgajhgdjhga this is WAY longer than i thought it would be so headcanons are under the cut

they’ve always loved doing gender conformingstuff from a very very young age, like painting their nails, wearing skirts,growing their hair out long, etc.,,, theres a ton of pictures of a rly littleconnor murphy running around in skirts and pigtails with their nails paintedall different colors,,, even still they HATED being called a girl, almost asmuch as they hated being told to ‘man up’ and ‘act like a boy’

zoe, their trans girl sister, came out when shewas 6 or 7, causing a lot of jealousy and resentment from connor. Jealousy becushe wished he could be as confident in one gender over another as she is but insteadhe just hates them both,,, and resentment becus their parents know how tohandle zoes situation waay better than they did connors (connor doesnt realizethat’s only because their parents had learned from their experience with them)

after zoe came out they stopped dressing up asmuch,, they didn’t feel comfortable dressing as girl when they weren’t one whenzoe was actually trying to live her life as a girl. They ended giving all their‘girly things’ to zoe as hand-me-downs and even let larry take them to get ahaircut

they realize they’re gay when about 13 or 14,,, havinggrown up hearing a lot of stereotypical homophobic rhetoric (not from theirparents specifically) they half believed the gay men dress up as womenstereotype and chalked up their gender issues to having issues with beinggay. They try their best to put out oftheir head how badly being called a boy or a girl makes them feel and focus onbeing comfortable with liking boys

when they started really go through the thick oftheir mental illness they grew their hair back out (mostly out ofdepression and an unwillingness to get things done) and started painting theirnails again (chipped black that would stay on for weeks,, never the freshlypainted rainbows from when they were young) and went back to questioning themselfon the daily. Im talking staying awake at night thinking “am I actually agirl?? no definitely not being seen as a girl sucks,,,, but I don’t think im aboy?? definitely not a girl and maybe not a boy what the fuck does that mean??”(they know they could probably google shit but their paranoia makes them tooworried someone will find out what they were googling and ask them about it andthey absolutely could not handle that conversation)

after their failed suicide attempt they spendthree weeks in the psych ward where they’re asked whether theyre comfortablewith their gender and sexuality and they lie through their teeth. They’re notcomfortable, they’ve never been comfortable, but theyre not about to tell thatto a strange. Saying theywere comfortable and happy with themselves in that regard felt like a punch inthe gut.

when they get home they have a whole list ofcoping skills and a ‘protection plan’ in place and theyre almost excited to seethings change for the better. they get meds, they get a therapist, and thingsare still really really rough but theyre actually trying now,,, and they wantso bad to rebuild their relationship with their family (mostly zoe, they knowwhat they’ve done to her and have no plans to forgive themself for it even ifshe eventually by some miracle does)

in an effort to actually work towards recoverythey try to figure themself outa bit and go back to doing their hair up and painting their nails differentcolors,, they even go so far as to get themselves some skirts and dresses fromgoodwill (only ever worn when the rest of the murphys are out of the house) andinstead of worrying about what those things mean they let themselves just enjoythe things they used to enjoy so much

zoe notices. she notices how hard they’re tryingnow. she notices how much less frequent their outbursts and episodes are. shenotices them specifically trying their best to be nice to her, to be a goodolder sibling. she notices how relaxed they look when theyre painting their nails, when theyre justfocusing on themselves instead of the world around them. she notices theyre a lotmore like the person she used to know. she also, thank god, notices thesick-to-my-stomach look connor gets when someone confuses them for a girl, andthe hesitation to correct them and say they were a boy. zoe notices all thesethings and they all point her in the direction of wanting to help her sibling,wanting them to know who they were.

·Her absolute first move is to drag connor along totheir high schools GSA,, having already asked alana (the genderqueer lesbian president)to make the subject of the next meeting a discussion on nonbinary genders. shesreally super confident they just need some things explained to them and thenthey’ll at least be on the right track.

Connor gets EXTREMELY overwhelmed at the idea ofso many fucking genders,, like they already hated the two and now theres so somany more for them to rifle through and figure out don’t fit them either. They kindof panic and leave in the middle of the meeting, not wanting to hear any more thanthey already did,, zoe chases after them and they absolutely pour their heartout in one long garbled paragraph that they barely breathe through before zoejust kind of pats him on the back like “you know its totally fine to just,, nothave a gender. Like that’s how a lot of people use the overarching nonbinaryterm, to just mean ‘genderless’” and that,,, genuinely calms them down. likeall those terms were so MUCH but just not having to deal with gender at allsounded SO appealing

and that’s kind of just?? It?? Like they knownow that gender doesn’t really HAVE to be a thing for them at all and they decidethat’s absolutely how they want to live their life so they straight up do,, being gay is the only thing that connects them to gender in anyway and tho that takes time to come to terms with on its own they really are genuinely happier now that theyre not left wondering whether theyre a boy or a girl

they still dont wear skirts or dresses in public anymore, but theyre fine wearing them around zoe and eventually theyre fine wearing them amongst their other friends as well (didnt take too long considering alana evan and jared arent cis either),, not to mention the shift in mood that came with their friends referring to them with they/them pronouns and gender neutral language

the end, connor is living their best life with friends and a sister who absolutely support them for who they are and are more than happy to help them through their rough days becus theyre willing to the same for all of them as well thank you

#connor murphy #dear evan hansen #deh #deh headcanons #murphy.txt #replies

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xaandiir · 8 years ago

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(Tumblr murdered the picture quality, please click on them to see them clearer)

Here’s my headcanons for the Dear Evan Hansen characters, including how they would sign their names :) I have more details regarding them and my headcanons below the cut!

Alana Beck

She’s a trans female butch lesbian who takes crap from nobody.

She has depression and distracts herself from it by getting really involved in anything and everything which is why she is does so much community service, internships, and club activities. She hates downtime.

She was bullied when she was younger because she was perceived as a boy who liked girly things.

When she reached high school she decided that she was tired of being bullied and so she officially came out to anyone and everyone and personally punched anyone that said something transphobic.

Her mother is very supportive of her decision and is helping her transition easier, as well as fighting the school when they insisted that Alana had to continue using the boy’s restroom.

Her father is distant and doesn’t like to be involved in her transition. It took him two years to finally use the correct pronouns but he continues to call her “Al” on purpose because it sounds more masculine.

Alana is planning on punching her father when she moves out of the house for being so terrible.

Jared Kleinman

He is a gay cis male and is well known at school as being the nerdy white “fuckboy” but he owns it anyway.

While he seems cheerful and such, he’s really lonely and knows that Evan is his only friend but he doesn’t know how to reach out to other people so he just kind of acts like a jerk so he can justify why people don’t like him.

He’s knees deep in League of Legends and probably will never pull himself out of his obsession.

While he has a bunch of followers on tumblr, he doesn’t talk about his personal life because he only gets 1 or 2 notes and it makes him feel bad.

He’s convinced that his parents like Evan more than they like him which is partly why he kind of treats Evan badly from time to time.

His “part time job” dream is to work at Best Buy but he can only land a job at McDonald’s or Lush.

Heidi Hansen

She is a bisexual cis female who grew up poor in her childhood.

She is very tired, all day every day, so her cheerfulness that she has in the musical is a mask that she only wears around Evan.

Half of the time when she says that she’s going to class, she’s actually going to her secret second job to pick up more wages to pay for bills.

While she sometimes fights with Evan about money, she refuses to stop taking him to therapy and getting him medication because she knows that his mental health is more important than fancy commodities.

Her ex-husband had depression and she always hated seeing the effects it had on him which is why she is so protective and concerned about Evan’s mental health.

While she can seem frustrated by Evan’s anxiety, she still loves her son as he is, and she wouldn’t mind if his anxiety never went away, even with the money and time spent with therapy and medication, because she knows that it’s not something that Evan can control that easily.

She is a very protective Mom™, but she can’t show it much because she’s always busy with work and classes.

Evan Hansen

He is a quoiromantic, asexual demiboy, but he hasn’t found the labels for any part of his identity yet.

He is very tall and big and so when people first meet him and don’t know him, they’re very intimidated, which plays into why he doesn’t have many friends.

He is on the autism spectrum.

He gets sensory overload a lot so he doesn’t eat in the cafeteria and usually eats in the hall outside the computer lab (since you can’t eat or drink in the computer lab).

He’s torn holes in his shirts and also stretched the hems too far due to his stimming and anxiety cues.

He chews on his nails a lot.

His favorite flower is the sunflower.

Zoe Murphy

She is a pansexual cis female who is Done With Everything.

She and Connor used to take piano lessons together before Connor quit and Zoe moved to stringed instruments.

She doesn’t like dresses or skirts and much prefers pants.

She’s always wanted to try cutting her hair to a pixie cut or undercut but she’s too nervous that she wouldn’t look good with it.

When Connor first started getting into drugs, she helped him hide it because he always promised that he would stop.

When it was clear he wasn’t going to stop, Zoe was the one to tell their mother.

After his first suicide attempt, Zoe slept in Connor’s room while he was in the hospital.

Milky Way is her favorite candy bar.

Connor Murphy

He is a gay and genderfluid/nonbinary (I can’t figure out which fits him better). He hasn’t figured out his gender and doesn’t really know that he can be anything but a boy, but he does know that sometimes he/him/his pronouns make him feel really uncomfortable.

He still remembers how to read sheet music and how to play Chopsticks on the piano.

He developed depression in middle school and struggled with it silently because he thought his parents had a stigma against mental illness (he was right).

He got into drugs in high school when a bad influential ‘friend’ told him that it would help curb depression symptoms. By the time Connor realized that his friend was completely lying, he was already addicted.

He is absolutely terrified to come out to his family as gay.

He’s always really liked Evan Hansen (as a friend or a crush, he never really knew) but because Evan was always with Jared, and Connor hates Jared, he always came off as angry and bitter.

Pot makes him really paranoid.

He loves nail polish but he’s never kept it on his nails for longer than one night.

Cynthia Murphy

She is a probably-straight cis female businesswoman (she’s never explored experiences with anyone other than men which is why I say probably-straight).

I honestly haven’t thought about her all that much because I don’t like her too much?

Connor was an accident and is what led her and Larry to get married.

She was pregnant with Connor when she was eighteen, just after high school graduation.

She’s always had a fantasy of the perfect nuclear family, and it seems she’s achieved that, but Connor being, well, Connor, has thrown a wrench into her dream.

She’s always kinda sorta resented Connor for ruining her life’s plan by being conceived (even though she’s the one who had unprotected sex).

She only drinks tea, and her favorite is a special herbal tea blend she makes by mixing a couple different brands of tea together.

Larry Murphy

He is a mostly-straight cis male businessman.

He had a fling with a boy one summer in his sophomore year of high school and still reminisces about it even though he’s never told anyone about the experience before.

He loves Cynthia but he doesn’t love her, y’know?

(He loved the boy from sophomore year.)

He loves sports a lot and still is incredibly disappointed that Connor doesn’t like spots like he does.

After Connor’s first attempt, he spent an hour crying himself dry and decided that he wasn’t going to let himself be so hurt, should something worse happen again.

Ever since then, he’s inflated Connor’s bad habits in his head so he would think of his son more like a criminal than his son.

Unfortunately after Connor died he was till torn apart inside but he successfully numbed himself and distanced himself from his emotions.

(Coincidentally, this was exactly what his dad did when he was younger.)

He really loves taking care of plants and wants to own a garden but he’s always too busy with work to successfully take care of one.

#dear evan hansen #deh #evan hansen #connor murphy #jared kleinman #alana beck #heidi hansen #cynthia murphy #zoe murphy #larry murphy #headcanons #xaandiir art #fave art

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