Concluding Pride Month media, I played Get in the Car, Loser! which is a queer road trip fantasy RPG. The lead developer Christine Love is a trans woman, and I'm not sure if everyone who worked on the game is trans but it looks like it's at least a high proportion.



The story primarily focuses on Sam, an anxious goth trans girl who's studying magic in college. Her classmate Grace steals a mystical sword and then recruits Sam to be her party's healer on a quest to defeat the evil Machine Devil (who, disappointingly, isn't this guy). It's going to be a bit of a drive to the Machine Devil's lair, but fortunately Grace's nonbinary partner Valentin has a car, and also serves as the party's tank. The contemporary-fantasy worldbuilding is only lightly sketched but that's all that's needed; the quest to beat the Machine Devil just provides a framework for the characters to talk to each other, build connections, and grapple with their own insecurities and inner conflicts.

( Read more... )

Get in the Car, Loser! is normally $24.99 USD on Steam, but is currently on sale for $17.49 USD, so this would be a good time to pick it up if it sounds like your thing!

Note: Emezi is nonbinary and started using they/them pronouns after this book was published, so earlier reviews may misgender them, as does the jacket bio.

This autobiographical novel follows Ada, a young Nigerian who is inhabited by multiple spirits. In Igbo the word for this is ọgbanje, which seems to sometimes refer to the spirits and sometimes the host (or maybe trying to distinguish the two is a failure of cultural literacy on my part). From birth, Ada knows she's different, and sometimes living with the spirits is a struggle. At other times they're a source of comfort and protection as she deals with unsettled family relationships, a move to an entirely new culture in the US, and intimate partner abuse. A lot of the time it's both.

Like Stone Butch Blues, this book is so memoir-shaped and episodic that it's hard to parse it as a novel, but it does have novelistic prose which is quite strong and evocative, and there's a satisfying arc. The use of alternating POVs among the different spirits is effective at establishing them as their own voices with their own motivations and interiority. Ada isn't really the main character—we get the spirits' perspectives on entering her body, being born from her trauma, and making decisions about how to deal with her, long before we ever get Ada's own POV. So it's more of an ensemble piece. Conversations between Ada and the spirits take place in an internal mind palace where each entity has a physical form, which helps it feel more vividly concrete rather than an abstract dialogue among inner voices.

The book takes an eclectic perspective on spirituality and mental health. Western psych concepts of dissociative identity are fluidly interwoven with Igbo religious traditions, as well as with Christian spirituality. (Jesus is an occasional visitor to the mind palace.) This feels very honest and unafraid to hold diverse truths, which is refreshing as well as thematically resonant.

Though the character Ada goes by she/her, she does have gender stuff going on, which is presented in the context of one of the inhabiting spirits being male. It was a little startling to me to have this portrayed so frankly, because it's one of those things we talk about in the trans community but not necessarily outside it, and it made me feel a strange mix of comfortable familiarity and high anxiety. Like, yes, there are trans/nb/genderfluid people who experience their gender(s) in whole or in part as plural identity, but you're not supposed to say that in public. But when I take a breath and look past that initial reaction, of course I realize that we can't get where we need to go by sanding the rough edges off our reality in the name of not scaring the straights.

I plan to check out some of Emezi's other books. Since this one is obviously a lightly fictionalized recounting of things that really happened, I'll be interested to see what they come up with when they write outside of their specific personal experiences.

Content notes for the book include: Rape, self-injury, disordered eating, and attempted suicide.

Flashing forward 75 years from The Autobiography of an Androgyne...

Stone Butch Blues is an autobiographical novel following Jess Goldberg, a queer working-class Jewish kid from upstate New York. It covers her 1950s childhood in which she is punished and rejected by her parents for not conforming to gender norms, her coming-of-age and finding a place as a butch in the lesbian community despite relentless police brutality, her decision to pursue medical transition, her partial detransition when she realizes she's neither a man nor a woman, her loves and losses, and her political awakening as a union organizer.

So, I came out as trans in the late 1990s, and two questions I soon grew to hate hearing were "Have you seen Boys Don't Cry?" and "Have you read Stone Butch Blues?" No, I hadn't, because I was already having a difficult time and I did not think I would find it helpful to consume media about people like me being raped and murdered, thanks. Well, I still haven't seen Boys Don't Cry (not planning to!) but now I have read Stone Butch Blues and I think I was right that reading it back then wouldn't have helped, except in that it would have given me more context for what some of the older people in the queer community had been through and why some of them treated me the way they did.

( Cut for length and content: hate crimes (in the book) and in-community hostility towards nonbinary people (in my own life). This post is more about me than about the book. )

Stone Butch Blues is available for free on Feinberg's website.

"There are thousands of physical females who feel themselves to be men and have the mental traits of men, and there are thousands of physical males who feel themselves to be women and have the mental traits of a woman. Should any blame be attached to such individuals when they conduct themselves according to their psychical [i.e. mental] sex?"

This is a pseudonymous autobiography by an American writer sometimes known as Jennie June, and sometimes as Earl Lind, Raphael Werther, or Ralph Werther (none of which were legal names). It describes June's experiences as an AMAB person who felt like a woman, had relationships with men, and eventually had a gender-affirming orchiectomy. The book advocates for kindness towards queer and gender-nonconforming people (or at least the sorts June approved of) and the repeal of sodomy laws. It was published under the imprint of the New York Medico-Legal Journal and its sale was restricted to "members of the learned professions" as June had been unable to find a publisher who would market it to a general readership, so it's framed as a sort of self-narrated medical case study.

I haven't read a lot of queer books of this era and I probably won't make a habit of it, but this was an interesting look at what people were thinking and experiencing not all that long before modern Western conceptions of trans identity and gender transition started to take shape.

I'm going to use he/him pronouns for June because that's how he referred to himself in his writing.

( Cut for length and content (hate crimes, sexual abuse and assault, suicide, period-typical social attitudes) )

The Autobiography of an Androgyne is in the public domain, so you can read it on Project Gutenberg or on the Internet Archive if you like.