This Is an Essay About Penises
“I spent years not thinking about my penis — or, at least, thinking about it as little as possible. After I transitioned, my penis became the most important part of my body — at least, to other people.”
What Self-Quarantine is Teaching Me About Gender Dysphoria
Three weeks ago I began my Coronavirus self-quarantine. Faced with the reality that I wouldn’t see anyone, I started an experiment. I wasn’t going to shave, paint my nails, or put on makeup — until I wanted to, for myself.
I Tried New Trans Dating App Fiori and All I Got Was This Personal Essay
“She admired my tits like only someone else on estrogen could and then she grabbed them harder than anyone had before.”
Why Do So Many People Have Goodbye Horses as Their Tinder Anthem?
“When I first matched with the “Goodbye Horses” fans and asked them about it one said, “that buffalo bill scene is classic” and the other said, “I LOVE the song.” Then they both ghosted.”
You’re Just You: An Accidental Love Letter to Los Angeles
“Towards the end of the night you fall and tear the skin on your knee. But you pop back up and keep skating. You’re relieved. Now that you’ve fallen once you know you’ll be okay.”
Uncharted Waters: A Trans Woman’s Journey Transitioning in the Navy
“Presenting as male every day hurts. When the ship is in port, it’s not as bad; I grow to hate coming in to work, but once the day ends I can go home and be myself. When we’re underway, it’s worse. I’m stuck being ‘him’ all day, every day. Sometimes for days, sometimes for weeks… once, for months.”
Every Trans Girl I Meet Is From the Future: Finding a Bereft Sisterhood
I find myself preemptively mourning the transgenerational communities and cliques and cults and clubs and covens of girls like me that could be and may not be.
The Day My Students Found My HER Profile
“I was terrified that I was going to receive a bunch of angry phone calls from parents or a visit from the overly religious principal as a result of word getting out that I didn’t fit the heteronormative cookie cutter mold that all of the other teachers at the school did.”
Why I’m Unapologetic About My Sensuality as a Black Trans Woman
“For me, as a Black Trans Woman, to find her body not only as something worthy and magnificent (as it is), but to find someone to share that magick with, may very well be one of the only moments she has to enjoy a trying and very taxing life — one that’s always trying to kill her.”
Queer Latinx Love is Resistance: A Collection of Vignettes
“There’s nothing more I want to remember than every moment and sensation we shared. Our grinding hips at Queer Cumbia, feeling your drunken sweat drip onto my freshly implanted tits. The way we sloppily made out and smeared our red and burgundy lips all over our mouths, noses, forehead, and neck.”
Sometime In June
“Keeping abreast of the passersby, the evidence of our intimacy was in the way we carried our hands. They were strategically placed so when they touched, it could be disguised as a perpetual accident. In honor of our silent dance, those near us were careful to walk around us instead of in-between.”
Stigma and Sisterhood: Life for Trans Women Since 1994’s “I Don’t Wanna Be a Boy”
“It took watching I Don’t Wanna Be A Boy to show me that the negative attitudes towards trans women have always been pervasive in society, that from 1994 to 2016 there hasn’t been much change in how society views us. But it also taught me that we share a sisterhood of sorts. No matter what time and what place, trans women of color are connected by our similar experiences.”
Skydiving in Two Genders: An Essay on Trans Visibility
“I decide I’ll test the durability of a BB cream by Tarte at thousands of feet in the air, then feel ashamed at worrying so much about how I look, then feel the dread again, that all this might go completely wrong, not because I’ll fall to my death, but because I’ll be reduced to my past.”
On Performing in The Vagina Monologues When You Don’t Have a Vagina
“There’s an annoying song that’s only playing all the way through all day long on some days. Others, I can barely hear the chorus, and others I can’t hear it all. But every day, I know that that song will be there again one day, maybe even tomorrow, maybe even later that same day. And I hate this song.”
My Trans Body as a State of Desire
“My brain is lit like the map of a major metropolis at night. My body is, too. ‘I am at one with a sea of sensations, glitter, silk, skin, eyes, mouths, desire,’ Anaïs Nin wrote, and that’s pretty much it. Or, put another way: I have found an affirmation of selfhood, and I haven’t thought to immediately annul it.”
On The 6: Confronting the Mortality of Girls Like Me
“Trauma wasn’t meant to happen at 9 a.m. on that August morning. Not when I was running on time, and somehow missed the long line for the day’s first cup of coffee. Nothing could have warned me that the meticulous construction of my person would be unraveled while my peers watched from their own cocoons of solitude.”
17 Incredible Autostraddle Personal Essays By Trans Women
This post is 25% Mey Rude Appreciation Club and 75% “personal essays by trans women oh my gosh how do I pick only 16.” (I picked 17.)
Making the Dive and Loving Myself Dangerously
“But, like embracing the woman I am, I couldn’t stay back from the allure of the waves. The pull of my trans-ness and queerness, of course, would always be stronger, the strongest impulses I have ever known. The sea, like them, was a place that represented a kind of forbidden love. I needed to overcome my fears or I would feel that I was holding myself back from living authentically.”
Natural Hair Was My Final Frontier to Self-Love as a Black Trans Woman
After removing my damaged locks, I realized that that was the easy part. Removing the Eurocentric straight- haired image of femininity embedded in my brain was much harder.
A Trans Woman of Color Responds to the Trauma of “Tangerine”
“Why is it that trans women of color have to experience so much violence to remember that they have each other’s back?”