#trans reads

[genderoutlaws]

[noahhawthorneauthor]

Happy Trans Awareness Week 🏳️‍⚧️✨🏳️‍🌈📚

Queer books, especially books with trans characters, are what helped me become the person I am today. In a world where it's easy to feel alone, you can always find the company you seek in not only books, but the people who enjoy them. I have made so many author and reader friends, and they make me feel so seen.

Don't underestimate the power of words, and kinship.

[read-alert]

Another crosspost from my Instagram!

I won't be participating in the Trans Rights Readathon because I only heard about it the day before yesterday and as a library reader, I don't think I can get my hands on the books I would need that fast. But I figured it was a good time to post my favorite recent trans reads! Full titles and authors under the cut

Black Movie by Danez Smith

When the Angels Left the Old Country by Sacha Lamb

A Prayer for the Crown Shy (Monk and Robot #2) by Becky Chambers

The Sunbearer Trials by Aiden Thomas

A Lady for a Duke by Alexis Hall

Bad Girls by Camila Sosa Villada translated to English by Kit Maude

Femme in Public by Alok Vaid-Menon

From the Stars in the Sky to the Fish in the Sea by Kai Cheng Thom and Kai Yun Ching

The Fae Keeper (The Witch King #2) by HE Edgmon

[golden-heretic]

trans rights are human rights

#transrightsreadathon tbr & recommendations 🩷 💙 💜

[isabelreads]

reading Nevada by Imogen Binnie for my trans studies seminar and while I've gone back and forth about whether or not I like it personally, the stream of consciousness prose is insightful, witty and so painfully real it resonates even with trans people who don't share the specific experiences of transgender women. It's obvious to me why this is a classic of 21st century trans lit.

(I can also see a ton of its inspiration it likely had on detransition baby by Torrey Peters for better and for worse lol)

[sweettooth97]

Anyone else ever think about how jumanji (2017) is a trans movie in like a lot of ways? Or is it just me?

[bisclavaret]

a day late to my 6 years on t anniversary ✨🏳️‍⚧️ a short comic about looking back

[transplanetary]

The Canberra Times, April 23 1989

[raynedayys2]

Normalize letting trans kids live.

Every trans child on this planet deserves to be safe & supported.

[ghelgheli]

In contrast with professional drag queens, who were only playing at being women onstage, [Esther] Newton learned that the very bottom of the gay social hierarchy was the province of street queens. In almost total contrast to professional queens, street queens were "the underclass of the gay world." Although they embraced effeminacy, too, they did so in the wrong place and for the wrong reason: in public and outside of professional work. As a result, Newton explained, the street queens "are never off stage. Their way of life is collective, illegal, and immediate." Because they didn't get paid to be feminine and were locked out of even the most menial of nightlife jobs, Newton observed that their lives were perceived to revolve around "confrontation, prostitution, and drug 'highs'." Even in a gay underworld where everyone was marked as deviant, it was the sincere street queens who tried to live as women who were punished most for what was celebrated-and paid-as an act onstage. When stage queens lost their jobs, they were often socially excluded like trans women. Newton explained that when she returned to Kansas City one night during her fieldwork, she learned that two poor queens she had met had recently lost their jobs as impersonators. Since then, they had become "indistinguishable from street fairies," growing out their hair long and wearing makeup in public-even "passing" as girls in certain situations," in addition to earning a reputation for taking pills. They were now treated harshly by everyone in the local scene. Most people wouldn't even speak to them in public. Professional drag queens who didn't live as women still had to avoid being seen as too "transy" in their style and demeanor. One professional queen that Newton interviewed explained why: it was dangerous to be transy because it reinforced the stigma of effeminacy without the safety of being onstage. "I think what you do in your bed is your business," he told Newton, echoing a middle-class understanding of gay privacy, "[but] what you do on the street is everybody's business."

The first street queen who appears in Mother Camp is named Lola, a young Black trans girl who is "becoming a woman,' as they say'." Newton met Lola at her dingy Kansas City apartment, where she lived with Tiger, a young gay man, and Godiva, a somewhat more respectable queen. What made Godiva more respectable than Lola wasn't just a lack of hormonal transition. It was that Godiva could work as a female impersonator because she wasn't trying to sincerely live as a woman. Lola, on the other hand, was permanently out of work because being Black and trans made her unhireable, including in female impersonation. When Newton entered their apartment, which had virtually no furniture, she found Lola lying on "a rumpled-up mattress on the floor" and entertaining three "very rough-looking young men." These kinds of apartments, wrote Newton, "are not 'homes.' They are places to come in off the street." The extremely poor trans women who lived as street queens, like Lola, "literally live outside the law," Newton explained. Violence and assault were their everyday experiences, drugs were omnipresent, and sex work was about the only work they could do. Even if they didn't have "homes," street queens "do live in the police system."

As a result of being policed and ostracized by their own gay peers, Newton felt that street queens were "dedicated to "staying out of it" as a way of life. "From their perspective, all of respectable society seems square, distant, and hypocritical. From their 'place' at the very bottom of the moral and status structure, they are in a strategic position to experience the numerous discrepancies between the ideals of American culture and the realities." Yet, however withdrawn or strung out they were perceived to be, the street queens were hardly afraid to act. On the contrary, they were regarded by many as the bravest and most combative in the gay world. In the summer of 1966, street queens in San Francisco fought back at Compton's Cafeteria, an all-night venue popular with sex workers and other poor gay people. After management had called the police on a table that was hanging out for hours ordering nothing but coffee, an officer grabbed the arm of one street queen. As the historian Susan Stryker recounts, that queen threw her coffee in the police officer's face, "and a melee erupted." As the queens led the patrons in throwing everything on their tables at the cops-who called for backup-a full-blown riot erupted onto the street. The queens beat the police with their purses "and kicked them with their high-heeled shoes." A similar incident was documented in 1959, when drag queens fought back against the police at Cooper's Donuts in Los Angeles by throwing donuts-and punches. How many more, unrecorded, times street queens fought back is anyone's guess. The most famous event came in 1969, when street queens led the Stonewall rebellion in New York City. Newton shares in Mother Camp that she wasn't surprised to learn it was the street queens who carried Stonewall. "Street fairies," she wrote, "have nothing to lose."

Jules Gill-Peterson, A Short History of Trans Misogyny

[noahhawthorneauthor]

and make it vague and genre bending 🐾🏳️‍⚧️📚⚔️

[read-alert]

Another crosspost from my Instagram! This time for the Trans Day of Visibility!

Full titles under the cut

Poetry

Bluff by Danez Smith

Even This Page is White by Vivek Shraya

[Insert Boy] by Danez Smith

Maiden, Mother, Crone: Fantastical Trans Femmes ed by Gwen Benaway

Giving Birth to Yourself: Poems for Combat by Kai Cheng Thom

Falling Back in Love with Being Human: Letters to Lost Souls by Kai Cheng Thom

Fantasy

Lead Me Astray by Sondi Warner

She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan

Out of the Blue by Jason June

Celestial Monsters by Aiden Thomas

Historical

Self-Made Boys: A Great Gatsby Remix by AM McLemore

Most Ardently: A Pride and Prejudice Remix by Gabe Cole Novoa

The Companion by EE Ottoman

The Spirit Bares Its Teeth by Andrew Joseph White

Horror

Manhunt by Gretchen Felker-Martin

Hell Followed With Us by Andrew Joseph White

Romance

I Think of You Often by Sienna Eggler

Their Troublesome Crush by Xan West

Drag Me Up by RM Virtues

Nonfiction

Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity by Julia Serano

Self Organizing Men: Conscious Masculinities in Time and Space by Eli Clare and Jay Sennet

A History of My Brief Body by Billy-Ray Belcourt

Miss Major Speaks: The Life and Times of a Black Trans Revolution by Miss Major Griffin-Gracy and Toshio Meronek

Indigiqueerness: A Conversation About Storytelling by Joshua Whitehead and Angie Abdou

The Appendix by Liam Konemann

Captive Gender: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex by Nat Smith, Eric A Stanley, and CeCe McDonald

Making Love With the Land by Joshua Whitehead

Graphic novels

Cheer Up: Love and Pompoms by Crystal Frasier

Across a Field of Starlight by Blue Delliquanti

Lumberjanes: Up All Night by ND Stevenson, Grace Ellis, and Shannon Watters

Trans authors but (to my knowledge) no trans characters

Sorrowland by Rivers Solomon

All the Dead Things by Bear Lee

Bitter by Akwaeke Emezi

Miscellaneous

The Many Half-Lived Lives of Sam Sylvester by Maya MacGregor

Catnip by Vyria Durav

[morganpdf]

Lost my fucking mind at a red light today

turning off reblogs bc im tired of terfs in my notes. anwyays trans people are sooo much cooler and sexier than cis people but especially terfs. bye

[shiftythrifting]

[queerbatting]

if you've ever wondered what gender euphoria feels like, this is it right here

(original tweet this post was taken from)

[h00f]

T4TM (Theseus4TheMinotaur)

lost wax cast bronze, patina & paste wax

2023

(process photos & info under cut <3)

my minotaur boy!! pls click on the photos for higher res! my thesis is focusing on trans men and creatures (how original ik) and this was last semester's final. i spent a lot of time looking at sculptures of the theseus/minotaur story, and yknow? a LOT of them are erotic! i'm pretty sure i saw some of them on tumblr a decade ago, and that's led to this now!

as you'll notice, the minotaur has a big t-dick! i wanted to give him breasts and an enlarged clitoris to present a very masculine trans figure. the boy on the bottom is also trans because i say so . the piece is about looking up to older, bigger, hairier trans men and seeing something awe-inspiring and beautiful. the minotaur was locked up by a cruel father for being different, and i think modern adaptations tend towards a sympathetic asterion (his name in one version)

making this piece was. so much effort. it took me about 3 months to get it all together - from clay model (plasticine) to 3D print to silicone mold to wax cast, and finally bronze pour into the shell mold. and then a TON of filing, sanding, dremel-ing, and various other metalworking techniques that probably took years off my life.

i started with sketches and made theeeeeee ugliest model ever:

then used a 3D scanner to get it digital, then spent a goooood month or two making him pretty in blender! then i spent an agonizing few weeks trying to get it print-ready, and fiiiiiinally did

^^^ an early resin printed draft of the model - you can see in the final that i added lots to theseus after some feedback, but sadly the nosering broke off every time i cast it so i just. let that be <3

then came the moldmaking, and then the wax dipping!! the yellow stuff is shell mold (ground up ceramic bits and algae soup, sticks to the wax, then silica sand in varying sizes on top) which gets the wax melted out, and bronze poured in!

then it's all metalworking, cutting stuff off, and working with hot metal. they don't tell you about all the bronze dust and how annoying it gets wearing a respirator AND goggles. but it is for me health, me boy. here's him all cleaned up before the patina:

and then i spray him down with various chemicals to make it "patina" (aka rust) in pretty colors. wait a few days, then apply paste wax to seal it and give it that shine!

then we get what you see above!!! the blue was actually unintentional, and i'm still not super sure why it looks that way.. but it's pretty so idc <3

thanks for reading!! if you ever have any bronze/casting questions, don't hesitate to message me! <3