Issue two - now on sale
Plus a peak inside
WBM2 - On sale at the Electronic Bay Trading Company web site. https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/318545833410
Thank you for joining us for another issue. Writing Badly is a new journal of letters on the topic of transmisogyny and transfeminism. It is a by-and-for trans women feminist publication. It wants to be a new home for transfeminine, transfeminist interlocution. It publishes one physical issue annually, which is not released digitally to the wider world for one to 5 years after publication. We don't do contents pages. Instead, I'm going to introduce every piece like a shite radio DJ. Partly to get us in the mood, out of the mood to kneejerk criticise, and in a space to enjoy these gifts of texts. Partly because, after editing many of them, I want to talk about them, and what I see in them.
And there's so much good shit in this issue? I planned for business as-usual but a real theme emerged and I'm super excited for it. Part one comes in two threads, one Italian, one English. Rome comes full of bile and spite for other femininities, England conflicted and meager. In part one, an absent history leaps from the page, demanding to be felt. New ways to empathise, to tell your story across time and space, will emerge. Part two, I hope, lands differently for how we've come to it.
Starting with notes on a folk band, its oblique stories and razor-thin connections hold oral tradition with a reverent fever. We open in England, straddling the Norman conquest, where Stupid's a tapestry you can melt plays sleight of hand tricks with sparse historical records.
Three essays from Rome sandwiches the Christian history of persecuting gallae, the 'castrated priests' of ancient Roman 'cults' at the moment of Roman Christianisation, within searing criticism of woke academic transmisogyny, how glibly they repeat ancient habits. Beyond being such a radical intervention into 'queer history,' the stories of trans women at the birth of Christian Rome will haunt you, form mythologies in your skull.
Back in England, we find the old fishing routes of trans women in seventh century England. Groping blindly in Badlesmere, I reconstruct the life of these women and speculate about the first bad ones arriving as Roman refugees. It's full of evidential threads and arguments that could only belong here. I spend some time thinking about why I became obsessed with them, how we approach history as trans women, what we come to it for. I'm really proud of it. It concludes in biblical times, forming, with these other texts, a hollow path for us to the ancients, tracing guilty cultural consciousnesses, forsaken female gods and the hermaphroditic pharaohs, lost in moments of empire.
We find followers of Cybele once again. Alice's account of the femminielle follows them through the birth of the Italian state, its statecraft, its hatred for Naples and its people, the invention of phrenology, the standardisation of life and sexual economies, the monopoly on violence and the end of lives that were swept away in that process. A few beautiful quotidian snapshots of these women's life at the birth of european whiteness, of nationstates.
Part two: now, and something more than now. Catrin reflects and poses problems on consciousness raising. Who was it for, really? What did we learn, really? Where did it find her in her life, and where has she gone since? What stuck out for me was discussing avoidance, and this group being designed to kill that, as though that care could never not be a threat. Every now and then she lifts the corner and reveals webs replete with stories and relationships few could ever pin down. You'll love looking with Cat's eyes for a day. Falling out of your issue right now is her gorgeous cross stitch pattern, somehow digital and familiar.
Deborah sits with questions about agency and approval in Liam Said it Wasn't My Fault, a broken monologue horror of a Lucy Letby-like character. Is she more Tim Evans than John Christie? What succour kills? And who would ask?
Adverts, letters, and poems are jumbled together. A few responses and updates from issue 1 are included. Get nosey. Write back.
A study came out this year about 'trans' life expectancies: the kind of study we had previously said was impossible or undoable. Its section on how it found its subjects stuck with me. Would any of the old guard from back home be counted? Which of my peers? What of the ones who died in just as much injustice as they lived? Whose death certificates read not just the wrong sex, but also the wrong cause? Thomasin Coggins writes at the birth of trans cancer research, asking what it is that we know about our health and medicine, and who is a subject legible, to be studied?
Speaking to this moment of internal migrations, Aidan Croft's Voicenote Domestic walks us through dislocated friendships and artistic life in New York, before an unwelcome interruption sits down to talk.
Finally, the lovely Sal pipes us out with her poem In The Safe Space Shhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
I always thought it was trite when anthology editors thanked everyone who has submitted but I've come to understand why. Women send me beautiful pieces of writing about philately, philology, something which makes her happy, with apologetic or hedged language in emails. And after a fifth read, an impression of what she believes she is allowed to know emerges, and from that a very intimate account of how authority has coloured her life. Often people are very tentative at first, polite, and warm up, in our email box or elsewhere, for having shared. You deserve gold. Thank you so much for letting me read your work for another year. Thanks to my sister, my first sister, for her companionship this year. To my mother, in presence and in absence, for her continued, loving provocation. Thank you to all the women I have met this year in places where women aren't often. Thanks to everyone who has written in, popped by to edit, to our studious copyeditor, patient cover designer, fastidious typesetter, and agile webmistress. Thanks to another new years day with the gang, frying sausages and deciding what to publish in our underwear. There has been so much fresh hell this year. I hope in the coming pages something speaks to you, helps you feel, sorts your thoughts, even if it's way off. Talk soon, and lots of love.
Editor xoxo
