Regarding the Boy
What happens to a place when it can no longer define itself by its history, when it tears everything down? What is the rust belt without the plants, the factories? Who is the boy without his sister?
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Posts Tagged: transgender
Boylen and Barth
In the New York Times, author and transgender activist Jennifer Finney Boylan describes how John Barth’s writing workshop helped her transition.
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The Saturday Rumpus Interview: Jennifer Baker
The more variation we see in life, the more it becomes less about seeing one type of book by marginalized people.
...moreThis Week in Short Fiction
Over the last several weeks, The Offing has been releasing a stream of stunning work from its 2015 Trans Issue, and the collection of transgender/non-binary voices they’ve cultivated forms one of the most powerful issues of any magazine we’ve seen this year. One story that stands out as a star among stars is Casey Plett’s “Couldn’t […]
...moreAdapting the Novel-in-Progress for Rapid Social Progress
Of course, there’s no way to pierce the heart and mind of a reader except with a razor sharp slice of the singular. Maybe fiction and identity politics have this in common. We can only achieve kinesthetic, flesh-and-blood understanding with palpable, enumerated specificity. How does a writer who’d started a novel involving gender and identity […]
...moreDan Weiss’s Morning Coffee
(Dan Weiss is out on tour with his band The Yellow Dress. He’ll be back on August 3rd.) In the best news ever for someone yet to be determined, J.K. Rowling has announced an open casting call for her Harry Potter spin-off. The Boy Scouts of America have (finally) unanimously approved a resolution allowing gay adults to […]
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SELF-MADE MAN #32: Grief is the Price We Pay for Love
My son, Mom said, even when it must have been so hard for her to rewrite the moment I was born, the one that belonged to her alone.
...moreCaitlyn is the New Clint: Why Jenner Matters
In all honesty, I’ve been out of the loop when it comes to the reality TV star formerly known as Bruce. Too young to recall Jenner’s decathlon-winning heyday, which launched him onto Wheaties boxes and into media stardom, and having neglected to keep up with the Kardashians, I’ve really never given a moment’s thought to […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Monica Byrne
Monica Byrne talks about sex, gender, the insidious power of stereotypes, and putting relationships between women at the center of her novel, The Girl in the Road.
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The Rumpus Interview with Shawna Virago
Musician and songwriter Shawna Virago discusses her trajectory as an artist, deciding to use Kickstarter to fund her new album, and what it’s like to be top Google hit for “San Francisco dominatrix.”
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It Hurts Too Much: The Emotional Reality of Trans Murders in 2015
Are you sad? I hope so. Are you angry? You need to be. We need you to share this work.
...moreWeekend Rumpus Roundup
In the Saturday Essay, Kenny Ng evaluates the groundbreaking show Transparent and its attempt to raise awareness of transgender and genderqueer identities. In the show, Arrested Development’s Jeffrey Tambor plays Mort, a lifelong family man who comes out as a transgender women named Maura. The show’s creator, Jill Soloway, negotiates complicated psychological territory. In the […]
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Transparent and the Evolving Culture of Shame
There’s a ray of nuclear longing at the center of Transparent…
...moreThe Trouble with Pronouns
I would never have consented to writing the story using a gendered pronoun for Sasha, but when that approach was rejected, writing without using pronouns at all seemed like a good solution. It was challenging to write that way without it being awkward, but it also felt a bit like writing formal poetry — the […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Thomas Page McBee
The Rumpus talks to contributor Thomas Page McBee about his new book, Man Alive, heteronormativity, getting mugged, living in New York City, and what it really means to be a man.
...moreBuilding Our Own Communities
As Ramadan approaches and we look for a family to break fast with come sundown, the realities of being a transgender Muslim set in. Flashing all of the proper signals I pass through gendered space unscathed, always left fearing how much I have to lose if outed. Some are forced to put on drag as […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Janet Mock
Writer and activist Janet Mock sits down to discuss her memoir, Redefining Realness, the representation (and misrepresentation) of trans stories in the media, family narratives, and the continued difficulties of writing about sex work.
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Trans* Litmag THEM in Print, Accepting Submissions
Groundbreaking trans* literary magazine THEM, launched online last year, is now re-releasing its first issue in print. If you missed out on it the first time, this is the perfect opportunity to acquaint yourself with the multigenre journal and its commitment to building a publication where contributors can, as founding editor Jos Charles puts it, “write […]
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Self-Made Man #27: Fool
I’d rather monkeybar across this subway car than turn away from possibility.
...moreWhen Journalistic Ethics Aren’t So Ethical
In the course of writing a story about a golf club, a Grantland journalist named Caleb Hannan discovered that the club’s inventor was a transgender woman. She ended up committing suicide, which, though he doesn’t seem to realize it’s a possibility, could very well be the result of his outing her.
...moreThe Lowdown on Queer Feminist Comics
“Sexuality is more than gay and straight, and probably even more than LGBTQIA. Comics are here to help.” So read the delightful subhed for Greg Baldino’s LARB review of two anthologies of comics about gender and sexuality. The books are The Big Feminist But and Anything That Loves, and though he’s frustrated by certain limitations, he also finds […]
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Self-Made Man #26: Wild
The wild don’t build fences; we let the worms and ivy and rats and love in.
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Silent Streets, Empty Runway
But in that instant, as I moved just behind her, she froze and pivoted, like a runway model, her hand gripped on her hip, and stared calmly into my face.
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Ease on Down
When I was coming up, my household owned just two videos, which I watched in perpetual rotation: the musical The Wiz, and Eddie Murphy’s 1983 stand-up act Delirious.
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Self Made Man #23: Serenity Prayer
In this new New York, I’m living inside the Serenity Prayer. I say this at brunch and people laugh but I mean it.
...more“I Am One of Them”
Crossing Over, a documentary by director Isabel Castro, follows three transgender women—all of them undocumented Mexican immigrants—as they seek asylum in the US. “Although this started as a project to raise awareness about the complexities of immigration,” Castro told Buzzfeed, “it has grown into one that is trying to raise awareness about transphobia (both in […]
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Coming Out, Again and Again, in 27 Easy Steps
1. Pretend it’s okay that your birth certificate labels you as female. You know perfectly well you’re not.
...moreAn Oral History of Unsung Queer Latino Immigrants
The new issue of SF Weekly features the life stories, translated from their own words, of four gay and transgender Latin American immigrants who came to San Francisco in the 1980s. The pasts they left behind are as dissimilar as the routes that led them to San Francisco, each a complicated journey shaped by the […]
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Self-Made Man #22: Second Person
I guess that’s what the dream wants: for me to know that the worst kind of man, the man I was scared of becoming, doesn’t frighten me any more.
...moreTrans Lit Blooms
“Whereas in the past, most trans books were non-fiction, either how-to or memoir books, we’re starting to see novels and short fiction coming from trans authors in North America,” explains Leger. “It’s a great time to be a trans person who loves books!” Next covers the surge in literature by transgender writers and the places that […]
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