there may be words

People Change by Vivek Shraya
Quick relisten to the audiobook looking for inspiration for a talk I was giving. I've got to say that while I love Shraya, this isn't my favourite project of hers. It could've either been an essay or a full-length book, but the pamphlet length didn't really dig in enough, but also felt a bit repetitive. I do like several of her core points about resistance to change and the lack of ceremony for it, though.


Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl's Confabulous Memoir by Kai Cheng Thom
I really love this book, and have read it three times now and written a paper about it, and then everyone in my book club hated it. Woe!

Magical realist auto fiction about a trans girl who runs away from home to end up on the streets in Montreal The City of Smoke and Lights. There she deals with magic, lateral violence and falling in love, and joins a vigilante girl gang to fight back against men attacking her community. It's whimsical, earnest and full of feelings, and I'm very charmed.

Hopefully Thom writes more novels. She wrote this in her twenties and seems to have gone back to poetry.


Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe
Reread for school. I still really enjoyed this. It's meant to be educational, and can be a little didactic in places, but I (being content with my assigned gender) thought it did a really good job of explaining the challenges and joys around changing gender expression in our moment. Also, the author is a giant nerd, which I appreciate (the highschool GSA turning into a The Lord of the Rings movie fanclub remains intensely relatable). I'm glad it's out there for kids who are feeling gender, but can't put words to exactly how or why. Which I guess is why it's one of the most banned books in North America, and has been for the last five years.


A Short History of Trans Misogyny by Jules Gill-Peterson
We got assigned a couple of chapters of this for school, and to be honest I skimmed them (not having realised how long they were, and not managing my time very well). However, I circled back and reread the whole book towards the end of term, and got a lot out of it.

Gill-Peterson is a leading historian of trans feminity, the ways governments have tried to suppress it, and the ways it's flourished despite that. A lot of her work has been around John Money's gender clinics, and how race and gender interacted in the mid 20th century, but this takes a wider look at gender variance across the former British empire, from the 19th century up to the present moment.

It came out a few years after Kit Heyam's Before We Were Trans, but approaches similar types of history from a different angle. While Heyam is talking more about the instability and variability of gender, especially in the British Empire, Gill-Peterson is more interested in how imperialism forced those variations into narrow categories in order to control them. Heyam's common history centres on how gender categories have always been porous (albeit in different ways), and Gill-Peterson's on the commonality of challenges regardless of self-categorisation.

I especially liked the final chapter, about how we might reframe the current gender conversation. To the point where I would take pictures of the pages, highlight lines, and add them to the group texts, getting responses like, "I don't know what you're talking about!" and "What?" But, in context, those lines are bangers! Trans-exclusionary feminism is coming from a scarcity mindset! So there.