Lately, I’m stockpiling trans literature like the Library of Alexandria is on fire. In a sense, it is. Trans erasure is reaching laughable proportions in the United States. While not law, executive orders target trans and nonbinary people in fetid mouthfuls, declarations like, “Defending women from gender ideology extremism and restoring biological truth to the federal government.” Institutions have folded to the pressure like dystopian puppets, even amputating LGBTQ+ to LGB on the Stonewall National Monument. (As in: sure, Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera shaped history, but they definitely weren’t trans.) Video clips depict federal agents disappearing citizens off the sidewalk for supposed thought crimes, nothing more. In an effort to save themselves, some so-called liberals advocate leaving behind trans people in policy and practice. Faced with this onslaught of events, sometimes I want to disappear into trans lit. But our stories require immediate action and preservation from rising flames.
On social media, the call to support trans and nonbinary people often results in the question of what to do. Inevitably a trans person will deadpan, “Give us money.” Under a government monopolized by the hyper-rich, buying books written and published by trans people is more important than ever. As an independent feminist press run by trans women, LittlePuss Press gifts 2025 with a stellar double debut: Vivian Blaxell’s Worthy of the Event: An Essay and Anton Solomonik’s collection Realistic Fiction. Let there be no misunderstanding or tokenizing. The LittlePuss Press offerings this year are not incredible books by trans authors. They’re incredible books, period. True to the press motto, whose masthead believes in “printing on paper, intensive editing, and throwing lots of parties,” reading both LittlePuss books back-to-back is like attending a celebration with two different but equally sharp jokesters. Blaxell unspools a devastating meditation on life, sideswiping you with rapid-fire jokes. Solomonik spins fictions that feel like jokes before you realize you are devastated by them.
Australian writer Vivian Blaxell is the co-founder of Tiresias House, the first Australian shelter and resource center for and by trans people. Worthy of the Event self-announces as an essay, though no genre quite encapsulates its seven sections. Blaxell patterns the world with mastermind dexterity, connecting a scatterplot of ideas on how to be worthy of the events we face. Her literary party boasts a lengthy guest list, ancient philosophers mingling with Blaxell’s trans friends who philosophize. Gertrude Stein, meet Fairy. Nietzsche, let me introduce you to Big Denise. Despite acting as a conductor to their orchestral chatter, Blaxell insists she is no philosopher herself, “no matter how philosophical [she] may become after one too many.” As party host, Blaxell lifts each thinker like shaking them for a secret prize, before cackling in self-deprecation and telling a story about body fluids. But you should know: she’s disappointed. Specifically in her vagina. Worthy of the Event opens with this side-splitting disappointment, before Blaxell dissects Spinoza’s disappointing God, a list of the Three Great Disappointing Places of Japan, and a Marine’s manipulation of disappointment as an excuse for his murder of a trans woman. Blaxell’s mind is a wonder, pondering Rachel Dolezal and McKenzie Wark against Hegel’s thoughts on mice eating communion wafers. She asks if kissing is collaboration, even if you’re forcing your cat into it. Blaxell chases beauty through Vaslav Nijinsky’s Rite of Spring choreography and Buddhists who observe corpses decaying, hoping to be worthy of a Tower when the card pops out of her tarot. Against three-dimensional journeys to Japan, she fantasizes about cross-dimensional travel to the tenth dimension. Blaxell even sings the transcendence of shit by way of Eileen Myles, Dodie Bellamy, and finally, her mother. From beginning to end, Worthy of the Event is funny as hell, writing as transcendent as it is human. I laughed out loud. I cried at the end. After reading Worthy of the Event, I absolutely worship Vivian Blaxell.
Blaxell warps the font, queering text down to the bones. Consider her response to her lover BamBam, after he states he won’t be taking their relationship to the next level. (I recommend reading aloud like you would a poem.)
While intensely funny, Blaxell pinpoints the exhaustion of fighting corrupt (and inept) bureaucracy in Sydney, returning to the Births, Deaths, and Marriages office day after day with an application for her new legal name. The clerks refuse Blaxell on account of her attempting to “hoodwink people” into thinking she’s a woman. (See Texas proposing a bill to criminalize trans identity on official documents through “gender identity fraud.”) Blaxell describes how Big Denise must submit to a government vaginal inspection while trying to get her birth certificate changed. (See World Athletics introducing mandatory sex testing for women on the bizarre rationale of “providing confidence.”) I wish I was reading narration from a trans elder who could frame these moments as bygone events, but instead, Blaxell reflects the funhouse mirror of our current world. How tiring. They’re still using the same old bigoted arguments. What a fucking disappointment. Thank god we have Blaxell to guide us through these events.
Blaxell dances, even while sludging through the shit. When systemic cruelty and the “repetitious character of political activism” finally exhausts her, Blaxell goes swimming, taped tight in her purple crochet bikini. And isn’t a life in the sun as yourself the whole point of flailing against red tape and abuse? Blaxell pushes further. After consulting her psychiatrist about getting a PhD, he patronizes her with advice: her life will be unhappy as “a sequence of vainglorious efforts to become something other than what you are” and to be “content with you being you.” (In another room, a psychiatrist will lecture me with similar words after I tell him that despite severe depression, my professional life was hopeful. I was trans, so he barked, “Obviously not, since you’re here.”) To be trans is to be scolded on who you are, then offered carceral walls disguised as protective structures. Blaxell offers the key to get out, julienning Being from Becoming with such ease, Nietzsche would swoon: “Being is you locked in as you. Becoming is you unlocked.” Worthy of the Event not only unlocks doors, but kicks down walls, collapsing the whole structure.
Blaxell writes with tender complexity about her friends, including a trans woman called Lana Luxemburg, named after the revolutionary. If her friend’s activism is chaotic against her namesake—basically limited to screaming at businesspeople, “Your end is fucking coming!”—isn’t that still worth quite a lot? Blaxell offers Luxemburg’s father in comparison, who refused to acknowledge either her life or eventual death. (See an estranged billionaire dad not only deadname but announce his clearly thriving daughter dead on social media. See Vivian Wilson lip-synch a hair-flipped response in video: “I look pretty good for a dead bitch.”) After Luxemburg’s death, Blaxell writes on her father, “He was unworthy of the event. Lana Luxemburg would want you to know that.” May all of us prove worthy of Blaxell’s writing, identifying such failures whenever they arise, celebrating the rest.
Brooklyn writer and illustrator Anton Solomonik populates his debut collection Realistic Fiction with characters who interact like extraterrestrial visitors to earth. Characters assess each other’s bodies, over and over, as if new to human form (or gender). Their awkward conversations become manual procedures, like when you become conscious of your breathing and suddenly forget how your lungs inflate on their own. Solomonik strips away automatic behavior in favor of hyper-self-awareness, turning personal motives strange. One character wants to be a writer but doesn’t write anything. (I felt deeply attacked.) Instead, he bumbles through a public reading with an anecdote about a hot tub, relying on his “innate storytelling ability.” Another launches a political campaign without caring much for politics. One character completely redefines manliness as wearing a polo shirt with confidence, sweatband optional. Solomonik’s characters somehow dream both below the lowest bar and higher than what’s attainable. One wants to get a job in a Boron mine and, in lieu of that, get a job at a Boron mine visitor center and, in lieu of that, work at a Boron mine visitor center without getting paid at all. One wants to be an “artist type . . . like in Good Will Hunting, except the thing that [he] would be good at would be writing, not math (and [he] would be trans.)” Every story in Realistic Fiction will make you cringe twice: once at the characters, then at the unexpected likeness in yourself. Solomonik’s writing is queer by any definition, revealing humans are no more strange than when they try to be normal.
Reading Realistic Fiction feels like witnessing a protagonist’s quantum leap from one body to the next, an unlikely hero slipping into each character like a costume. Solomonik confirms the sensation, writing a literal body jumper story with a protagonist leaping into a great historical moment: a threesome with President Kennedy and his presidential aide. After finishing off the aide, the jumper relaxes by waxing existential, “His will and his body—like that of Kennedy—were not his own, but belonged to something greater than himself—to God, to History—some terrible, nameless, unfathomable thing.” Solomonik satirizes the fervor of nationalism, then spits on transphobic accusations. When a character attempts to sell a sheaf of porn at a schoolyard, the kids transform into a Shirley Jacksonian mob, gleefully chasing them off. Confronting conservative narratives of trans perversion à la Wilde corrupting the youth, Solomonik plays out ridiculous anxiety to a ridiculous end.
When Solomonik’s characters crossdress, they switch clothes enough times that they create an infinity mirror of gender expression. Desire rises in the reflection. But one character’s Meaningful Ex theorizes that “in order to be passionate about someone, truly passionate, you had to feel that they were very different from you. Something about them had to be so compelling that it threatened your whole ‘normal’ way of life, its familiar priorities, forcing you to enter a whole other world.” The character arrives at a different conclusion: “The Meaningful Ex was different from me. But in some ways they were the same. It actually amounted to the same thing: the dissolution of that boundary between you and other people.” Solomonik and Blaxell unlock each other’s work to similar effect, dissolving boundaries for wisdom. When Blaxell meditates on how to be worthy of an event, she writes, “one of the ways to be worthy of what happens is to make—or let—things be both right and wrong at the same time. One of the endowments of any long survival of any kind and any intensity of disaster might be the ability to hold usually mutually antagonistic values and concepts together with love.” In other words, empathy is not only possible for survival but its unexpected product.
I hesitate to say trans literature teaches us how to love, against platitude. But if the LittlePuss books are advanced exercises in cognitive dissonance, Blaxell and Solomonik insist on returning to matters of the heart. I did finally look up the destruction of the Library of Alexandria, finding that the fire destroyed an estimate of 100,000 books. I wonder how many trans storytellers exist right now, even knowing there’s no way to count. No matter if there are ten or ten million of us anyway. Blaxell and Solomonik show that to be worthy of this moment is to spark a bonfire with our words, no matter how they try to snuff us out.
