No Need for Defense

What did I learn from falling in love with a trans person? That spark plugs are on sale this week at Fleet Farm. How to feed a chicken. How to drive a trailer. The secret to making the best mojito you’ve ever had.

So begins Blair Braverman’s essay on her relationship with her trans partner Quince, a meditation on love and misunderstanding, and even outright hate, in small-town America. This is not an “expose” on what it’s like to be trans or to be intimate with someone who is, but rather a story about what it’s like to fall in love when the people around you don’t understand and aren’t sympathetic.

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Kelly Lynn Thomas reads, writes, and sometimes sews in Pittsburgh, PA. Her creative work has appeared in Sou’wester, Thin Air Magazine, Heavy Feather Review, metazen, and others, and she received her MFA in Creative Writing from Chatham University. She is hopelessly obsessed with Star Wars and can always be found with a large mug of tea. She also runs the very small Wild Age Press. Read more at kellylynnthomas.com.

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The Rumpus publishes original fiction, poetry, literary humor writing, comics, essays, book reviews, and interviews with authors and artists of all kinds. Our mostly volunteer-run magazine strives to be a platform for risk-taking voices and writing that might not find a home elsewhere. We lift up new voices alongside those of more established writers our readers may already know and love. We want to bring new perspectives into the conversation that will make us all look deeper.

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