Editor's note: I have had such a busy past few weeks! Last weekend Alana and I went up to Seattle for the TRANSplants Zine issue #3 release party, and I found the experience challenging to my creative practice (and like, personal philosophy?) in a number of good but unexpected ways. One of my takeaways is I want to try writing less for the blog (at least in the short term) and instead focus on pieces I can take to open mics. Hypertext can feel like a bit of crutch at times, and I want to see what sort of writing I produce when factoring in time and the spoken word.
With that in mind, here's my first attempt at a 5-minute read, with some edits for the web. I'm hoping to find a mic in Portland where I can take this soon.
July 2004. After lurking for several weeks, Social sciences professor Susan Driver finally contacts the LiveJournal group called “Birls”—a “community dedicated to boyish/androgynous girls.” Driver is researching how queer teen girls form subcultures online, and the birls’ interactions have shaken her understanding of gender and sexuality. The birls are more than happy to answer Driver’s questions about what exactly it means to be a birl, and why they all seem to be so horny for each other. Driver notes:
Commenting on the sexual allure of birls becomes a daily ritual of birl members, reinforcing self-confidence and collective bonding[…] Such affirmation unites this community as a place to find sexual acceptance. Their mutual belonging rests on a mutual appreciation of their appeal as birls.
June 2019. Sol Brager, a birl alum, publishes a comic about Birls titled “LiveJournal Made Me Gay.” Brager writes, “we were, even if we didn’t realize it, constantly negotiating the borders of birlhood as an identity, as a community of belonging, and as a community of desire.”
September 1998. TransGender Forum webmistress Cindy Martin puts the finishing touches on her latest “pictorial” in CorelDRAW, then uploads it to the worldwide web. A pictorial is a collage of glamour photos of a specific TGForum member, showcased as a “special feature” on the site. Martin links each member’s pictorial to their ad in the personals section, a page replete with photos of every TS, TV, CD, and TG who has the means to get online. Though many members call themselves heterosexual, being able to peruse each other’s flirtatious photos seems to be one of the most important functions of TGForum. The degree of care that Martin puts into each pictorial is obvious: she knows what it’s like to want to be valued, desired, seen.
May 2023. I’m on a video call one Saturday morning with the other admins of a large transfem Discord server. Nobody on the call apparently wants to be responsible for the NSFW section, where user generated content runs from ooh-I’m-being-so-bad bathroom titties to edgeplay. One admin proposes cutting the section entirely, and I push back. “I’m not into lewds personally,” I say, “but it seems like a lot of people get something out of it.” We eventually cut the kink channel, which leads to general outrage and my own shameful departure.
April 2025. Dripping wet, I stand in my bathtub and angle my phone up from my thighs. I take the picture, and post it to the group chat, with the caption: “POV: you’re about to eat me out in the shower.” My friends light up the post with pleading emoji reacts. I’m not sure why lewd selfies have started feeling more appealing to me—is it the validation that I’m desirable? Is it helping me accept my new pussy? Or do I just need to be reminded that someone out there knows I exist?
Early 1962. Illustrator Vicky West and a handful of other members of a crossdressing club in San Francisco arrive at a house with paper bags that hold their illicit outfits. Their host, Virginia Prince, invites them in and instructs everyone to put on their hose and heels—together. According to Prince, no member can narc the rest out for crossdressing if they all watch each other dress.
...
Before West moves to New York City in 1968, Prince will rename the growing club the “Society for Full Personality Expression.”
Mardi Gras, 1978. Photographer Mariette Pathy Allen shares breakfast with a group of crossdressers at her hotel in New Orleans, and starts to take pictures of their poses and gestures. Allen spots Vicky West, and feels something that will cause her to shift her career to focus on gender diverse subjects. Allen later says that it was “as if I were seeing into someone’s soul, unburdened by masculinity or femininity, as if in covering her male anatomy with a beautiful dress, her full humanity was present.” (emphasis mine)
June 2025. Nervously, I approach the now 85 year old Mariette Pathy Allen at the bustling opening of her retrospective. I gush to Allen about her work, and how it helped me find empathy for an ancestry that I initially struggled to connect with. She smiles at me with her soft periwinkle eyes, and then compliments my “nice” face and “not too broad” shoulders. I wither, reduced to my passability. Later, it occurs to me that Allen was trying to do me a kindness—she was trying to see me the way she thought I wanted to be seen. But I don’t need a famous photographer to see that I’m worthy of desire. I have my own people for that.