Mira Bellwether, author of the groundbreaking zine Fucking Trans Women, died on December 25th, 2022, at the age of 40. Her partner Callan Molinari confirmed Bellwetherβs death on Twitter. According to Bellwether’s GoFundMe page, she’d been diagnosed with lung cancer in October 2021. On December 19th of this year, Bellwether’s health took a turn for the worse, and she was admitted to the ICU. She spent her final days with her partner Callan and her sister CJ whileΒ Star Trek: The Next GenerationΒ played in the background.
I didnβt know Bellwether personally. My knowledge of her life is limited to her social media presence and tweets from her friends, who are naming Bellwetherβs kindness, her wisdom, and her βfierce wit.β I wish I could say more about the kind of person Bellwether was, but the only thing I know for sure is this: Mira Bellwether was the kind of person who made shit happen.
I first learned about Bellwether after readingΒ Fucking Trans Women, an 80-page illustrated guide to sex for βnon-op and pre-opβ trans women and their partners, which Bellwether self-published in 2010.Β Hereβs how she described the zine in a 2013 Autostraddle interview:
βFucking Trans Women is, at its heart, a how-to manual, and the finished product is good sex. I wanted to stress the biological facts of our bodies. We have to build a very basic vocabulary and common understanding in terms like, βthis spot has lots of nerves running through it. This part likes pressure, this part likes stroking, this other part can do X, Y, and Z.β If you keep sex at the conceptual level, I think you find that itβs not as rewarding as you want it to be. In order to have good sex, I think we have to acknowledge our bodies, come to terms with them as they are, and be able to inhabit them. In other words, to be immanent rather than transcendent.β
The zine covers anatomy, sex techniques, toys, communication, and more. And if you’ve ever heard of “muffing,” you can thank Bellwether for that. In Fucking Trans Women, Bellwether coined the term to describe the act of penetrating the inguinal canals. Just to give you an idea of how trailblazing this zine was: There were no pre-existing diagrams illustrating the bodies and sex acts Bellwether wanted to depict, so in true DIY fashion, she drew the diagrams herself.
Bellwether’s language is never didactic or bogged down in metaphors. It’s honest, inviting, and intensely personal. On every page, it’s clear that Bellwether β a self-described trans dyke β wrote this zine because it absolutely needed to be written.
βOne of the reasons this zine happened was that I got really sick of explaining things and teaching my lovers about my body during time that should have been spent having sex,β she told Autostraddle in 2013. βWhen one of my lovers said that she wished she had an instruction manual for my body, I took that and responded to it pretty literally.β
When I stumbled across Fucking Trans Women in 2011, I was thrilled. As someone who’s loved and dated trans women and as someone who went on to write about sex for a living, Bellwether’s zine was exactly what I wanted and needed to read, and many of the lessons I drew from her writing have shaped how I approach my work today. I often come back to this paragraph from the introduction:
βHere be dragons and sea monsters, my fellow genital cartographers, and we have a lot to learn from poking them,β Bellwether wrote. βLet the metaphors, the language, the analogies come afterward. They are helpful, but I believe with great conviction that what I have between my legs is not a metaphor or an analogy but something new and wonderful.β
Writing about trans bodies in a way that centers playfulness β or really, writing about trans bodies at all β was revolutionaryΒ in 2010, and itβs still revolutionary today. More than twelve years later, Fucking Trans Women remains a go-to sex education resource. I cite this zine over and over again in my writing, and I’m sure I’ll keep coming back to it forever.
Iβm incredibly grateful for Bellwetherβs contributions to the world. Iβm thinking of everyone who knew and loved her and everyone who was touched by her work. If you haven’t the privilege of reading Fucking Trans Women yet, I hope you’ll do so in Bellwether’s honor.
You can purchase Fucking Trans Women online for $10. Upcoming proceeds will help Bellwether’s loved ones cover her medical expenses and funeral costs.
Her zine was really helpful when I first came out. Thank you.
Hello! Y’all seem to have intended to leave a hyperlink to purchase the zine to support her medical and funeral costs but the link goes instead to an older autostraddle article. Can you please update it? I’d like to donate to her fam
Hi, Oliver! Thanks for letting us know. The link has been fixed!
Thank you for writing this Ro
Ro, this tribute to Mira Bellwether’s work and life is going to stay with me. Thank you for writing it. And I’m sending so much peace to her family in the days and months ahead. The loss of her is immense, but her legacy is still here and felt by all of us who do this work.
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Really grateful this was published on Autostraddle. I read the 2013 interview in 2013 and the zine earlier this year.
Thanks for memorializing her, and for promoting her work in the past. I also read the zine in 2010/11 and remember how transformative it was then. I even printed out a copy for my therapist!
I was thinking about this resource the other day; thanks for the link! <3
thank you for this. her 2013 interview and FTW was a turning point for me and without it I don’t think I would have gone into my next relationship as I did. I reread the zine this evening… I am eternally grateful for the work she did and am saddened by her loss.
This is such sad news for Mira, her loved ones, and the world. I consider FTW to be the most important sex education text of this era, it pushed the door open and provided a foundation for so many people to build on. Thank you, Ro, for this tribute.
I wish autostraddle had written something about Mira more recently, before she died, so we could have celebrated her while she could still feel our appreciation of her. How can we better appreciate and love trans women while they are here with us?