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.
Bicycling Across India, Learning About Queerness and Intimacy Along the Way
Lying in bed, she asked why I thought she’d be into women, and I tried to explain that Indian norms are full of moments Americans consider to be flirting. “Holding hands doesn’t mean anything,” she said. “It must be so sad to not touch your friends.”
A Love Letter to Butch People (That Is Accidentally About My Dad)
Being able to be soft in this world is important for a lot of folks; but also, I think it’s a privilege. And when you exist in a world saying “women look like this” and you do not look like this (and maybe even aren’t a woman), it takes being hard in order to thrive. There is beauty in being hard that way. There is a reason we tell our lovers their haircuts make them look “sharp.”
Migration Season
“At the start of migration season the ruby-throated hummingbird has only one goal in mind – she has to almost double her body weight, in order to survive a treacherous trip across the gulf of Mexico. At the start of migration season, the black-haired filmmaker has but one goal in mind: build a strong enough case to survive the gauntlet of work-visa processing.”
How to Make a Meme: A Tutorial With Instagram Lesbian Superstar @xenaworrierprincess
Maddy Court, the creator behind Instagram lesbian meme sensation @xenaworrierprincess, teaches us how to make a meme and shares her own meme origin story.
Lesbian Visibility Day Roundtable: Carrying History, Worshipping Women, F*cking Up the Patriarchy
“For me, lesbian completely casts aside the idea of men. It puts me and the people I love ahead of the patriarchy. It relieves me of even pretending that I give a shit what any of them have ever thought. It thankfully gives me space to center women (and other people who aren’t men), which is all I’ve ever wanted to do.”
Monday Roundtable: Introverts and Extroverts and Our Myers-Briggs Personality Types
“Apparently INFJs operate more off feeling, and I would say that intuition very much commands my brain/heart ship, so it’s an accurate assessment. How’d this bitch know that I’m soft-spoken though?”
Relearning How To Dress Myself From The Closet I Came Out Of
I feel the need to do something to the outside of my body to mark the tremendous shift I’ve experienced inside — to somehow match my inner self to my outer self. But I’m not sure who my inner self is anymore.
5 Years Sober (Or, the Meanest Lesbian I Know Punched Me in the Face)
“I knew that somewhere along the way, I stopped being sober for her and had started doing it for me — and that realization hit me harder than my own fist.”
Original Shenny Fan Fiction: “This Is What I Want”
It’s 2017, and married power lesbians Jenny Schecter and Shane McCutcheon face some tough stuff only days before Carmen De La Pica Morales is coming in for a weekend visit that turns out a whole lot cooler than anybody could’ve predicted.
Carrying Heavy Shit: Teaching and Unteaching Gender in the Wilderness
“There’s an easily accessible narrative in wilderness travel, to pretend we’re living outside of society, and to strive to create a better version of it. The temptation to argue that “x doesn’t really matter out here” rears its head in all of the usual places: race, socioeconomics, gender, age. What I’ve come to struggle with in the canoe, and years later, is which way to go. To continue my first argument, to dismantle gender, or to teach gender – to teach what it means to be a strong, dirty woman, to ask my co-instructor to teach positive masculinity.”
My Absurd Skincare Routine Is the Softest I Am to Myself
Sometimes being queer and black, bisexual and biracial, feels like contradiction, like too many things, and sometimes I’m not sure that I’d recognize myself if I walked by.
The Good China
“We rarely left the bedroom and when we did, we quickly returned. We called in to work and on one occasion we both no showed. It was heavenly, but as the old adage says all good things must come to an end.”
Wherever West Is
“Loving women and loving the land are the two things I told myself I would never do, and somehow, they got all tangled up in each other.”
Why I Got Off the Pacific Crest Trail After 454 Miles Instead of Walking All the Way to Canada
I stopped hiking the Pacific Crest Trail in 2017 because of toxic masculinity and bro culture in the hiking community. It exists, it’s shitty, and it fucked me up.
Monday Roundtable: They Would Never Have Guessed
“People are usually surprised to hear things about my past, like how I was a cheerleader, and in a sorority, and a dancer, and in musical theatre.”
Bad Religion
“Here was a community where race apparently didn’t matter, because we were all humans, made in the image of God. Where a pacifist, sensitive, caring Jesus was the primary male role model. I finally felt at home. I was promised complete acceptance and understanding, and all I had to give was… well, everything.”
On Loving My White Mother
In which a debate over body hair pushes a white mother and her brown daughter to the limits of mutual understanding.
Monday Roundtable: Very Superstitious, Writing’s on the Wall
Do you pick up pennies for good luck? Does part of you still think stepping on a crack will break your mother’s back? Did you know that apparently “to kill an albatross is to cause bad luck to the ship and all upon it”? Bummer!
I Hated Country Music Until I Met Lena
“Who was this country-music-loving New Englander? I both hated and loved that she seemed to be playing this garbage as if to impress me.”