This essay explores the ways that teleological narratives of transition come coupled with corresponding affective narratives that frame life “pre” transition as characterized by a reductively bleak emotional surround and cathect life “post” transition to a bright-sided promise of social ease, domestic comfort, and existential peace. Building on Lauren Berlant’s theorization of cruel optimism and…
Her doctor is giving her the body of his dreams…and her nightmares. Isa is a micro-celebrity who rarely shows her face, and can’t wait to have it expertly ripped off and rearranged to look more feminine. When a successful fundraiser makes her gender affirming surgery possible, she’s overjoyed—until she has to give up all her…
“You’re a monster. All the children here are monsters. This is the Academy for Monsters.” Falcon Quinn and his neighbors, Max and Megan, board bus #13 for school on an ordinary day in Maine. Only the bus doesn’t take its ordinary route, and the friends soon find themselves in an extraordinary place—on Shadow Island, at…
Trina Goldberg-Oneka is a trans woman whose life is irreversibly altered in the wake of a gentle—but nonetheless world-changing—invasion by an alien entity calling itself The Seep. Through The Seep, everything is connected. Capitalism falls, hierarchies and barriers are broken down; if something can be imagined, it is possible. Trina and her wife, Deeba, live…
In a futuristic society run by an all-powerful Gov, a bender teen on the cusp of adulthood has choices to make that will change her life—and maybe the world. Fifteen-year-old bender Kivali has had a rough time in a gender-rigid culture. Abandoned as a baby and raised by Sheila, an ardent nonconformist, Kivali has always…
Sallot Leon is a thief, and a good one at that. But gender fluid Sal wants nothing more than to escape the drudgery of life as a highway robber and get closer to the upper-class—and the nobles who destroyed their home. When Sal steals a flyer for an audition to become a member of The…
As with the first volume of Transcendent, Lethe Press has worked with a wonderful editor to select the best work of genderqueer stories of the fantastical, stranger, horrific, and weird published the prior year. Featuring stories by Merc Rustad, Jeanne Thornton, Brit Mandelo, and others, this anthology offers time-honored tropes of the genre–from genetic manipulation…
There is a growing recognition of the importance of transgender perspectives about the environment. Unlike more established approaches in the environmental humanities and queer studies, transecology is a nascent inquiry whose significance and scope are only just being articulated. Drawing upon the fields of gender studies and ecological studies, contributors to this volume engage major…
The goal for Becoming Dragon was to develop a working, immersive Mixed Reality system by using a motion capture system and head mounted display to control a character in Second Life – a Massively Multiplayer Online 3D environment – in order to examine a number of questions regarding identity, gender and the transformative potential of…
This is not an article. If anything, these are “trans futurist spiritual science visions”: radically vulnerable interventions that aim to disrupt naturalized forms of publishable knowledge while centering the needs, fantasies, and longings of disabled queer/trans folks in practices of future-making. These lines transcend the limits of academic knowledge. They are an act of resistance…