🏳️‍⚧️🇵🇸

🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍⚧️transfag (he/him)🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍⚧️ who likes poetry and things. blanket CW for posts about abuse/trauma. I post a lot of nonfiction/memoir and fiction quotes pertaining to abuse/trauma (including erotic fiction.)

[laciere]

"I was once asked by journalist Ari Gray - who's also my occasional hiking buddy - something along the lines of what it means to me to be Black in the woods. I don't remember what exactly I said, but it was probably something about the relief I felt in shedding the racialized shell like a cicada's when I hit the woods - how I'm just kinda free until another human perceives me. But that was years ago. The way I think about my Blackness has changed. Mine is a Bredda-Nansi Blackness, a needing-to-know-and-to-collude-with-or-(rarely)-conspire-against-every-single-animal-in-the-village Blackness. I come from a tradition that incorporates prayer, storifies every relationship, whose tales are each one of them a woodland vignette. I meet Bredda Nansi, or Aunt Nansi - him, her, them- whenever I go to the woods. When I go looking for mushrooms, i find everything else, including what fruits authentically from within me when nobody is watching.

Mycophilia helped me unlearn a tendency to vivisect and standardize that informed not only my idea of my place within (or outside) the ecosystem, but also my conception of how to inhabit my own Blackness. Before mushrooms, Blackness used to be so much less expansive because i allowed it to be defined for me by others, like cops, amidst concrete. The tools I was using to view my Blackness were of European manufacture, bequeathed by white supremacist schooling that so many of us must work to counteract. That race was socially constructed in these circumstances, but nonetheless informs the cultures one comes up in and the traditions one is pressured or allowed to claim or refuse, of course complicates matters. Amid these tensions, my Jamaicain-ness used to be distinct from my Caribbeanness somehow, which was distinct from my North Americanness, my whole self further segmented by being twice diasporic.

Some will disagree that I am anything but a United Statesian, given how young i was when I migrated here; others might suggest the extent to which I represent my Jamaicanness or even West Africanness to outgroups is the true measure of who I am. But the pursuit of fungi has me reconstructing my conception of the "self" from scratch - with pantry ingredients that spring back to life with rehydration, along with novel staples. What it means to be Black has taken a surprisingly central place in my rebuilding, surprising because it wouldn't have occurred to me to lug into the woods the socially constructed version of myself. But my Jamaicanness is made of fresh-picked food; of making the best of the ingredients available; of gloating with loved ones about how good it is despite its humble ingredients; of knowing how to work the land you live with; of reciprocal relationship with that land. It's church on Sunday, and whereas my cathedral is now usually a canopy of trees, it's as strong as the community that we're building there, which has been growing hunt by hunt, genuflection by genuflection. It's in all things pointing back home, from the chicken-of-the-woods patties, to hen-of-the-woods jerked jerky, to "saltfish" made from fishy salt-cured Hygrophorus flavodiscus. It might be curried venison, jerked wild turkey, or brown stew squirrel. Sorrel made with sumac and wild ginger. Solomon Gundy from fresh fish caught off the Massachusetts coast. Drumskins from amadou. The list goes on. A child of the diaspora, I recognize that every "new" thing is made from ingredients gathered before. I insist that my identity did not spring from a colonizer's head.

The study of mushrooms has given me back some of my ghosts. If most ghosts are gauzy apparitions, mine are slightly more vivid now, somehow. I can see the connections straining to make themselves to me. Some have said that whatever happened before colonizers came is of no comfort, and that feels right to me - with the proviso that whatever happened before is a wind I will happily feel at my back, once the ghosts there are speaking a language I can understand.

Histories of migration, questions of who brought what where, did not come fully alive for me until i found the sticky web of ancient, ever-present mycelium. They can chop down family trees, even hang us from them, but the mycelium keeps spreading under our feet."

Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless: What Fungi Taught Me about Nourishment, Poison, Ecology, Hidden Histories, Zombies, and Black Survival by Maria Pinto (2025, The University of North Carolina Press)

[laciere]

"It was becoming clearer by the day that the partner I lived with had a vision of his future that was incompatible with mine - that I was a weird, queer, cyclist peg attempting to fit into an impeccably landscaped, violently hetero, roads-have-no-shoulder hole. The career i wanted did not seem to want me, and my attempts to make moves to correct that felt like spinning in place. All around me my peers were making chosen and biological families and building activist networks and sharing their art. In doing so they modeled for me what I wanted, but there was always a voice in my head saying that they'd gotten there because they knew who they were, a privilege that was not available and could never be available to me. Those who have felt like the owner's manual for their three-score-and-ten was not included in the box will know what I mean. Maybe "who I am" was buried under a morass of frustrated expectations and goals for making art and loving on my own terms that felt delusional in an apocalypse. Unable to see clear to that fabled version of me, which was really a chimera of the achievements and expectations of others and therefore not truly inhabitable, I waded into an ocean of cheap cabernet to distance myself from my day-to-day. I kept living the lives of others - riding the train into their towns to walk their dogs and look after their homes, ghostwriting their books, falling in love with their partners-to-be, a means of fighting isolation that further isolates.

[...]

Later, in autumn, that Polish friend of mine who had grown up hunting mushrooms and acted as my foraging mentor had a dinner party and sent her guests home with a peculiar favor - a paper shopping bag filled with as many hen-of-the-woods mushrooms as they cared to schlep away. Under her tutelage, I'd picked, cooked, and enjoyed the sculptural fruit bodies before. But it wasn't until that evening, during a wine-drenched moment when I stole away to really look at the dozens of large mushrooms she'd lined up on a bench near her back door, that I realized Grifola frondosa was more than inspiration to get creative in the kitchen. I picked one up. it was the heftiest I'd ever held, weighing at least fifteen pounds. I looked closely at the patterned, leaf-like caps that give the fruits their descriptive Latin name, flipped it over and put my nose right up against the white fertile surface with its many pores, like the inside of a bone. This chitinous mass was actually stunning; the way the silvers and creams shaded into the brown zones of the pileus mesmerized me. I thought about the way their flesh squeaked upon being harvested with a knife. A deep quaff brought me vaguely dirty animal aroma that translated to such rich umami when they were sauteed in cast iron. I searched for and found some of the fungus' tenants - an orange-striped salamander coexisting with a jumping spider on the mushroom's interior terraces. I thought about how the oaks they skirted were usually girthy elders and how the fact that this particular fungus grew there could offer clues about the land from which it emerged. If my usual move at parties had always been to find the dog or cat with which to splay out on the floor, I had now outdone myself by finding the mushrooms at which to coo, with which to cuddle. That night, G. frondosa had come int focus as something more than food, had become an organism: a mycelium, that being doing humble but essential work and making beautiful art in its spare time, a dramatics of survival in multiple acts. The fungus was using its scent and its taste of earth and its beauty and its heft and its eerie polyphonous voice to speak questions directly into my spirit. And my answer in that moment, because it was high time I immersed myself in a nonhuman language to the extent that i could, was, "Yes, just let me get my hiking boots."

With winter looming, I joined every online fungal forum watching with satisfaction as posts from my past life were replaced on my newsfeed by fungus identification requests in fora I'd lately joined. I bought very book. The queendom I'd begun acquainting myself with was endlessly fascinating, omnipresent, all-important ... yet relatively little was known about it. On days when I didn't have to walk dogs, I was out on the trails near my home, determined to tread all of the 250-plus miles of them, the thousands of acres of readily accessible from my front door. I was gone sometimes from sunup to sundown, my health app logging 30,000 steps between 8am and 7pm.

Under the canopy there was no phone signal. The mushrooms hid when you first walked by, the photogenic troops periscoping from pulpy, broken wood on the side of the log that came into view only on the return. Day after day, I got on my knees to take photos of their textures and colors. I chewed and spat their flesh, the residue of their identities on my tongue. Learning each new species helped terraform and fertilize what had been razed in my heart's landscape. I was learning that if losing one's self in other people could mean sudden enclosure, a shutting out, a hastily scrawled "no trespassing" sign, then losing oneself in a mysterious, capacious, and ever-expanding science might mean the opposite: no gate could shut to keep me away from the world fungi opened up.

[...]

Here was a different kind of love to feel, perhaps the closest I'll ever get to the agape variety that was supposed to animate me in church growing up. Meanwhile, the partner I lived with couldn't forgive me for disappearing in a clouse of spores. I don't blame himl; not only had I stopped cowriting the fiction of my domesticability, but I was once again going feral, turning him to a mushroom widower, inchworms vibrant in my hair, psilocybin reminding me that the day is plastic. One day in the woods, I told Anansi t hat I was going home. In response, I saw him take down his old web by the light of the sinking sun and set to work building a new one. "Who I am" spoke to me clearly in that moment., It was time for dismantling. I made a New Year's exit from that past life, but in many ways, I'd been going for ages."

Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless: What Fungi Taught Me about Nourishment, Poison, Ecology, Hidden Histories, Zombies, and Black Survival by Maria Pinto (2025, The University of North Carolina Press)

[laciere]

"Fungi have made it possible to think with a different model: one in which the aboveground is just some of the story, and perhaps not the most interesting part. Indeed, the aboveground can be made just as alien as its more hidden neighbor, when viewed through a fungal lens. When I look at the mysteries and illegibilities of fungi, I can relate. Learning about them has taught me to dwell more comfortably in mystery, even as I pursue answers and better questions. Plenty of the material conditions and habits of thought that root and connect people to things and to one another on this planet can feel somewhat notional for me, as a neurodivergent, naturalized US citizen from the Caribbean, and a descendant of enslaved people. I've lived my life within an epistemological framework in which those true, to-the-center-of-the-earth roots were for others, not me. And since my family tree came from a clear-cut forest, I would of necessity be relegated to a surface kind of existence. But the more I learn about the ancient origins and tantalizing futurity of fungi, about their potential for earthly and mental remediation, the more I've realized that my kinship lines feel more mycelial than tree-like. That, like fungi, the stuff I'm made of (that we're all made of) has the power to move in darkness, to thrive undetected, to quietly work until such a time as there's nothing left to do but fruit. All eukaryotes have a common ancestor if we go back 2 billion years, anyhow. In this way, I recognize fungi as my kin. I truly can, and do, relate.

As of this writing, huge strides toward an ecologically sound understanding of our planet are being made by using a fungal lens. The North American Mycoflora Project, which turned into the Fungal Diversity Survey (FunDiS), is mounting a heroic effort to encourage citizen scientists in their documentation of the rich fungal biome we live with every day. The scientists behind SPUN (Society for the Protection of Underground Networks), an international effort to map our mycelial networks by taking thousands of richly myceliated soil samples from around the world, began work in 2022. Popular participation in science is enjoying a nineteenth-century-style uptick: via online applications like iNaturalist and Mushroom Observer, crowdsourcing is expanding the mycological record. At the same time, those who've thought of themselves as the center of humanity are being forced to admit that the margins (and those they sought, and seek, to bury underground there) are where the keys to our continued existence can be found. Reckonings abound as our planet continually tips toward apocalypse. And as this dark renaissance takes root, I've begun using a fungal lens to bring my own mental and ancestral underground into focus. The essays here are a record of that exploration. As I sought a path to a more integrated sense of my past and the future, I found there's nothing lime the study of fungi to encourage ecological thinking and explore notions of discrete individuals, lone actors, and single-stream histories."

Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless: What Fungi Taught Me about Nourishment, Poison, Ecology, Hidden Histories, Zombies, and Black Survival by Maria Pinto (2025, The University of North Carolina Press)

[laciere]

It was strange, being together again. All through the end of high school they'd been caught in each other's hair, trapped in a succession of tiny apartments and unable to stop seeing what had happened to them that one summer every time they caught sight of each other. She still felt it, even fifteen years later. Just a glimpse of the old scars on Shelby's forearms and she was back in their blood-spattered bathroom keeping pressure on the wound and wishing she was anywhere else, even back home in the airless tomb of her parents' house. It wasn't that they hadn't been close, it was that they'd never been able not to be. They were her family, and seeing them made her feel like she was drowning.

Cuckoo by Gretchen Felker-Martin (2024, Nightfire)

[frailflame]

"You. You, dear reader, must be curious about my gender. Perhaps you are even feeling a little anxious. Or you might have scraped together clues from what I've said and how I've said it, constructing my gender to your own design. Regardless as to whether you are right or wrong, you will have come to your own conclusions.

After I was thrown to this place against my wishes, I did my best to survive; I discovered that there are many of you who, when meeting someone new, first take their gender into account. I also get the impression that it is only after a gender has been assigned that you are seen as human. This process is completed so naturally, and with such alacrity, that you aren't even aware of automatically assigning a gender to others. But there is a time when you do become aware: when you are uncertain of another's gender. You get anxious when, wherever you may be, you encounter someone who you cannot immediately classify as male or female -- or, to put it another way, when the "evidence" for your gender judgment is conflicted. This is because, according to your narrow system of understanding, it is difficult to decide how to interact -- for example, what honorific should you use -- with someone whose body you simply cannot decipher.

You, dear reader, are an old hand at the gender-matching game. No doubt about it! From a tender age you have guessed the gender of countless humans whose bodies are covered by clothes, coming to conclusions based on the gender you believe corresponds to the shape of genitals you believe match up with the remaining exposed parts of their bodies, and you have lived your lives in certainty, believing the result of your deductions to be true. The problem is, however, that you do not acknowledge the mistakes you have made and will continue to make. No one knows that the game itself is a mistake.

Oh, I do apologize. I have yet to reveal my gender, leaving you, dear reader, trembling with anxiety. How cruel! Well then, I will alleviate your anxiety. I'll now give you succor. Shall I put you at ease? Hahaha, shall I ease your mind? I will relieve you. I am

female

That is, at least I am until I have completed my journey to that man's house and taken care of my work. What does it mean to be a woman? Among other things, it means that you have to decorate yourself and act like a woman. No one has ordered me to do so; I willingly take on the responsibility. For if the performance is not carried out properly, I am nothing more than a monstrosity. It is imperative that I am not seen as a monster. My work and my life depend on it. Are you listening? Pay close attention to what I have to say. This is purely a matter of survival. If I don't become a woman -- or, when the occasion calls for it, a man -- I will starve to death. If I mean to satisfy my hunger, then scarcely living will not suffice. We must always do more."

-- Walking Practice by Dolki Min, tl. Victoria Caudle (2023, HarperCollins), originally published in South Korea as 보행 연습 (Bohaeng Yeonseup), (2022, Eun-haeng Namu Publishing Co)

[iwasneverserious]

“I put barbed wire up between me and the intrusive hand that fondles, that rips, that pats and then slaps. When I go out in public, I wrap my body in barbed wire. I unwind it at night to be with my lover while both of us drink to numb the pain that tracks across our arms, our breasts, our thighs. Sometimes she mocks me when she fights with me, her hand and voice mimicking mine. With bitter laughter, she calls me queer. I wonder what kind of woman I would be past these boundaries. Maybe someone naked in a silk robe, the contours of my body shifting as fluid as the fabric, skin flexible as silk. How much of a man would I be, how much of a woman? If I could slip off the robe of my gender, my sex, who would I lie down with, naked?”

— S/he by Minnie Bruce Pratt

[laciere]

"Medical transition can have costs for trans sex workers that are not exclusive to the price of surgery or prescriptions or appointments with doctors. Our desirability to clients is impacted by our sex characteristics, therefore so is our income. The removal of breasts, changes to our genitals, or the masculinization that comes with taking testosterone will change whether certain clients are interested in booking transmasculine sex workers at all. Surgeries will put us out of work during the recovery period, leaving us in limbo wondering how much money we may still be capable of earning, depending on the reaction of the client pool to our new bodies.

Affording surgery or HRT is a fantastic incentive for transmasculine people to sell sex. We are discriminated against in employment and earn less than cis people on average, so sex work sometimes becomes our only reasonable option for saving money for something like top surgery or metoidioplasty or phalloplasty. These surgeries can cost tens of thousands of pounds, making them prohibitively expensive for the average person.

The high cost of medical transition is also likely to steer trans people towards higher paid forms of sex work, despite the relative danger. In-person forms of sex work like full service sex work or stripping tend to pay more, compared to online-only options, with the except of performers who become well-known. For transmasculine people who want to seek masculinizing medical treatment, there is a short window where we can attain our maximum earning potential under the kind of female personas we discussed earlier. In the hopes of making this window as short as possible, transmasculine people may take more risks than we would otherwise like to with the clients we take and the ways we work.

Working while claiming to be a cis woman, presenting femininely with a female persona, allows trans sex workers to accumulate the money for HRT and surgery more quickly than if we were openly trans. As we transition, our income typically drops, potentially leaving us stuck at one stage of transition if we didn't earn enough money from sex work before we began. To maintain the desired pace to our medical transition, we are forced to make sacrifices and to plan them well in advance.

We might save enough money to afford testosterone and be desperate to take it, but have to hold off on doing so if we hope to afford top surgery in a timely manner. Some of us will make the decision to delay transition until we have enough saved for top surgery, only to be left with the same dilemma about lowering our income and the possibility that we will never afford bottom surgery. There are options in between, to start testosterone and hide it for as long as possible, or to film content in bulk and keep selling it when our bodies no longer look the way they did, all involving the same types of risk calculations and their own drawbacks. [...] At the point where we decide that medical transition is worth the cost, however we arrive at that point, we're forced to omit information when dealing with medical professionals or face additional barriers. Gender therapists will ask us about our sex lives and gender presentation, leaving us to weigh up the likelihood that we would be rejected for treatment if we tell them about our work against our desire to be honest. Any doctor may decide they don't believe we fit the criteria, or that we're lying about our gender identity, if they know we regularly sell sexual services to men who think we're women. We've come a long way since Lou Sullivan pushed for gay trans men to be recognized as men and to have access to medical transition, yet bigotry still persists when it comes to trans people selling sexual services.

Transgender sex workers who begin sex work after they've attained the transition milestones they want won't have to worry about lying to get initial diagnoses and referrals, but they'll still face stigma from their doctors. In the current political climate, with constant attacks on trans healthcare continuing, all transmasculine people are at risk of disruptions to their HRT prescriptions, so adding another marginalised identity only increases the danger. Lying continues to be an important safety measure and many of us benefit from keeping our status as sex workers out of our medical records.

Beyond the doctors and therapists we must interact with to gain access to medical transition in ways that are legal, there are yet more medical professionals with interact with as sex workers. Services which exist to provide us with STI tests or resources cater overwhelmingly to women, and our state of medical transition may impact how good the care we receive from these services is. These issues impact us no matter when we started sex work, be it pre-transition or after beginning HRT and getting surgery. Even the transmasculine people who are uninterested in medically transitioning are not spared, because coming out to a medical professional or being visibly trans will cause them to treat us differently.

Basic care from STI clinics can be impacted by our medical transition. Nurses who administer tests or ask us questions are often not familiar with how our bodies work or the kinds of sex we are capable of having, so they make assumptions and their biases lead to worse care. When we need access to PrEP, a HIV prevention, we may be given incorrect information about its effectiveness based on the assumption that we use certain parts of our anatomy and have vaginal sex (PrEP takes longer to be effective for vaginal sex than anal sex.) Our issues with vaginal atrophy can be overlooked as being the result of seeing so many clients or having so much sex, leading to assumptions that we aren't using enough lube or that the sheer amount of sex is the issue, rather than recognizing the effects of a lack of estrogen can have on our genitals.

It's no wonder, given all the issues that can arise for transmasculine sex workers when we seek out medical transition, that there are so many of us who do sex work only prior to our transition and quit afterwards. I wasn't surprised to hear from one transmasculine sex worker that his retirement was more of a logical consideration than a choice he made based on preference. "When I dropped to earning barely more than I was spending on ads, after I got top surgery, I realized I had to retire."

The transmasculine sex workers who do continue to do sex work after we transition frequently find that we change the type of sex work we do, moving from brothel work to independent full service sex work or from that to online porn creation, and lower the volume of clients and customers we interact with. Different stages in transition can require entire re-brands.

To lower the number of trans people who engage in sex work out of desperation, as opposed to making the decision under less pressure, the cost of medical transition needs to be covered by other means. ending employment discrimination gets us closer, but with the low rate of pay that the average working class person can expect, that will won't be enough to mitigate the need for an additional income source to afford medical transition quickly. Transition care, like all vital medical care, must be made free if we wish to remove it as a factor which drives people to sell sex."

– from “Chapter 4: The Cost of Medical Transition,” Jack Parker, from Working Guys: A Transmasculine Sex Worker Anthology ed. Jack Parker (2024, self-published)

[laciere]

"Detransition is suggested as a solution to the way we are targeted [by violence], by transphobic cis people who fail to grasp the trade-off, as is leaving sex work. These ideas, naturally, ignore the financial reasons that people do sex work and the psychological damage done by forcible detransition. Cis speculation also fails to account for the impact of dysphoria (made worse by detransiton) on a person's desire to commit acts of self-inflicted violence, thereby not protecting us from it at all. When faced exclusively with bad options, we are not unreasonable for picking the best of them. As one eloquent interviewee put it, "I'd rather have a few clients hit me and get rough and afford top surgery within the year than go unmolested and kill myself in the GIC queue."

Those of us who continue to do sex work, especially whilst advertising ourselves as being transmasculine or claiming to be cis women despite having visible effects from testosterone, generally do so with awareness of the risk we are taking. Our decisions cannot be brushed away under the assumption that we are acting irrationally. Depending on our circumstances, we may consider the risk to be acceptably low and otherwise find the work fits with our lifestyle, and for some of us there is simply no better alternative. Rather than telling us to quit our jobs due to the bigotry of others, compelling the abusers to find other targets instead, the issue must be resolved at its core. Whorephobia and transphobia must be eradicated in their entirety, to make trans sex workers safe."

– from “Chapter 3: Transphobic Violence Against Transmasculine Sex Workers,” Jack Parker, from Working Guys: A Transmasculine Sex Worker Anthology ed. Jack Parker (2024, self-published)

[laciere]

"As women [sex workers] are the most sought after by the predominantly straight male client pool, trans men and transmasculine non-binary people frequently pose as a gender that is not their own to attract them. We construct female personas. [...] I have heard from a flood of transmasculine people who are (or have been) "cis for pay". Dozens of transmasculine sex workers and former sex workers reached out to me, as a direct result of an article[2] I wrote about trans men being a hidden population within sex work, and I interviewed many of them. [...] Through meeting so many other sex workers like myself, I was reminded of my own early experiences selling sex whilst claiming to be a cis girl and woman. I lacked the awareness I have now, so I believed that my presumed lesbianism was the reason I felt the need to play a character for my clients. hearing that other people also used mental gymnastics to explain away their dysphoria when writing their escorting ads or taking nudes for their subscription sites brought me comfort. Meeting (mostly cis) sex workers who did not construct a separate work persona confounded me, at the beginning of my sex work career. I had universalized my own experience as if it applied to all cis women who sold sex or made porn, not yet realizing I was trans. Having a masculine gender identity had a huge impact on how I felt about acting as a woman to seduce straight men, but I presumed that the disconnect I felt between my true self and the roleplay I did for work was inherent to being a sex worker. Once corrected, I felt like I was doing something wrong. I felt alone. [...] After I came out, I began to find other transmasculine people in similar circumstances. They confided in me that they also constructed female personas. [...] Since so many sex workers use a stage name for work, as a way to protect our identities while dodging stigma and state surveillance, it becomes easier to think of our work self as a different person. In the case where this persona is a different gender to us, we are primed to develop an alter ego or to treat our work persona as a part we're playing instead of reducing it to a pseudonym. I think about my peer saying "she isn't really me" in reference to the performance he embodies when he sells sex and it resonates with me.

The reality that many transmasculine people put on a complex feminine act, rather than simply claiming to be women and still acting like ourselves, raises the question of why we do so. Feminine women tend to be considered more desirable by clients and customers, but changing all of our mannerisms and lying about our hobbies isn't necessary to attract those men. Why build a character when we could settle for a feminine overlay, complete with only a name and a dress and maybe a wig? [...] It is possible that these female personas are an overcompensation resulting from a belief that many trans people have, that others can sense something is off about us. A cis female sex worker might feel comfortable presenting as a tomboy whilst a transmasculine sex worker becomes convinced that their transness will be discovered if they allow themselves a sliver of gender non-conformity. Meanwhile, clients are frequently oblivious and are likely to project whatever they desire onto the sex workers they see, in the absence of something extreme to jar them out of their fantasy. [...] Cis and trans workers alike have to contend with how clients anticipate they will behave and what they expect of someone they view as a woman. These differing expectations include, but are not limited to: having higher standards for how feminine women of colour should be, viewing certain expensive attire as essential to an elevated level of femininity, seeing youth and femininity as being bound together.

Whether a client has high standards for the femininity of some sex workers they see does not directly correlate with how feminine transmasculine sex workers of those demographics will act. Maintaining a feminine exterior can be time-consuming, expensive, and exhausting. In some cases, that standard that many clients have becomes so high that it stops being worth it for the sex worker to try at all, and the female persona collapses into a simple claim to be a woman regardless of presentation. How successful this is likely to be, in terms of attracting and keeping paying clients, will continue to be impacted by the client's bigoted views on how women of different demographics should behave. [...] I asked one black non-binary worker to share why they feel so much pressure to be hyper-feminine for work, and they responded, "That's because I'm the only black girl- not that I'm really a girl- at every [strip] club I work at. Loads of people want my place and I need to be perfect to keep it. I spend so much on nails and lashes that it makes a big dent in what I take home." [...] Ultimately, the believe that there are a relatively small number of trans men and transmasculine nonbinary people doing sex work can be attributed to the way so many of us hide behind acting as if we are women. Speaking to even a small number of transmasculine sex workers reveals this flaw. You cannot find the number of transmasculine people using an escorting website or working at a strip club or making porn when so many of us are actively lying about our gender to keep our earnings up. Researchers will get false information from us too, because we are unlikely to trust them not to report it in a way that will out us, and they should recognize this.

In the period of time when I was still working under a female person, I only came out to my closest friends and a limited number of other (predominantly also trans) sex workers. It is much easier for us to find each other, by word of mouth and spotting each other at events within the sex worker community, than for anyone else to find and study us. Any estimates of the total transmasculine population in sex work are hardly worth the time they take to read.

Presentation and gender identity are not one in the same thing, and this is doubly true when someone's presentation is being altered by an additional outside force. Sex workers' female personas are not built to be easy to see through; if we are armed with the knowledge that transmasculine people use them, we can be prepared to recognize them for who they actually are underneath, when they reveal themselves.

[2]The hidden trans men in sex work, 23 May 2023, Irresistible Damage, a magazine for gay and bi trans men/mascs"

-- from "Chapter 1: Female Personas," Jack Parker, from Working Guys: A Transmasculine Sex Worker Anthology ed. Jack Parker (2024, self-published)

[plasmapop]

03/04/2026 • did you know mt etna has its own species of birch? did you know im normal about mt etna

[d3monl0ver]

ruthless little things by elizabeth v aldrich

[giveherswords]

Bluets, Maggie Nelson. 2009

[laciere]

"The first time I break the casing of a Bic lady's disposable razor and press the metal into my wrist I am fifteen. "Parasuicide" is sometimes described as non-fatal self-injurious behavior with a clear intent to cause bodily harm or death. The word "clear" gets stuck in my throat. Para -- "alongside" suicide? My death travels with me. The spore of it. If I can get over the aversion to the corruption of my own flesh, it's always there, alongside. Look, I don't know why I was that impatient to see for myself whether death was inside me, whether I could dig deep enough to find this thing everyone was obsessed with and nobody talked about, but I was. Call it youth -- you stay young for as long as your curiosity is boundless. Or you stay young if you die that way. Dissociation and depression and self-harm are all supposed to be constellations of the same dysfunction, but I've cut my skin on a day of delirious happiness and sometimes it seems to me like I want to take that happy feeling with me to some other place.

"Do you like yourself?" my mother asked once. "It doesn't seem like you do."

I answered yes, though later, in my room, I turned the question over in my head until I cried.

The right question, which neither of us could have known at the time, was, "Where did you go?"

Now, on the verge of leaving my thirties, the correct questions have become, "By whose clock are you living your life?" And, "What are you and all the organisms that hold you together doing to be worthy of your freedom, to practice it every day? TO know that your movements are your own?"

At the end of our conversation, I ask Araújo what species of entomopathogenic fungi, besides scale insect parasites and Cordyceps militaris, I might expect to find this far north in Vermont, which is where I am while we talk through Zoom. He tells me that Gibellula can be found up here on the undersides of leaves. "So just turn thousands of leaves, and you will find them."

Just keep turning leaf after leaf after leaf."

-"In Search of Ophiocordyceps unilateralis," from Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless: What Fungi Taught Me About Nourishment, Poison, Ecology, Hidden Histories, Zombies, and Black Survival by Maria Pinto (2025, University of North Carolina Press)

[seekingstars]

HOW’S THAT HOUSE THAT RAISED YOU? - Lev St. Valentine

[laciere]

The woman in Pet Sematary is actually a man (or is played by one), just like Samara in the original Japanese book is -- one last irredeemable thing about these movies glommed onto my own identity. In both, the idea of a woman who doesn't match the standards of normal womanhood, an uncanny woman, is a form of sickness, too. Medical transition, like disability, is viewed by the mainstream as a sensational departure from normalcy. But the two are not the same, and I don't want to talk about my trans body here because my trans body is not what makes me ill. Besides, my trans needs and my other embodied needs are different: My wrist braces and my tuck may both be made from fabric, but they feel completely different against my skin. The insulting thing about these movies is that they don't hold space for the complexity of a body, lumping every form of otherness together into the same melange. By The Ring and Pet Sematary's calculation, what's bubbling through my joints and what's beneath my pants are both equally, and similarly, repugnant. Here is my life: I was born, according to some, defective. I went to physical and speech therapy. I went to doctor after doctor. By the time I hit undergrad, my defects were all but invisible. Even now that they've resurfaced, I can go day-to-day without displaying a single one. The surprise on people's faces-- but oh, you don't look disabled at all. I would have never known. And then in the middle of this, I came out as trans and tried to pass as a woman who is well. I put on makeup and shut my trap and disappeared from the record. I wrote "F" on the intake form at an urgent care and hard to fabricate an entire history of menses to the nurse practitioner in order to even make my appointment. I don't request accommodations and am hired for jobs without a second glance, working around flare-ups and sick spells all the while. As long as I don't show signs of being disabled or trans, I'm safe. There's a privilege here, but an immense loneliness, too. And while I've finally learned to find myself in the solidarity of being visible, for years I thought i had to stand alone. There's a whole canon of literature determined to talk about the redemptive qualities of horror as a mode of truth-telling -- the feminist or subversive ways they can be a home for the marginalized viewers -- Carol J. Clover's Men, Women, and Chainsaws, Kier-La Janisse's The House of Psychotic Women, and more. But while I like these books, that's not what I'm interested in discussing. These movies -- with their sick, twisted women and their healthy heroines -- hurt me, and I kept watching them. There's nothing redemptive or revolutionary about that. But they were all I had, so the pain became a home, too. And now, I'm stuck with it all.

Uncanny Valley Girls: Essays on Horror, Survival, and Love by Zefyr Lisowski (2025, Harper Perennial)

[laciere]

Black Swan is a movie about someone whose devotion is so pure it annihilates her. Or rather, Black Swan is a movie about someone who is persuaded to believe in an art so pure it can annihilate, and in doing so make it true. Or, Black Swan is a movie about someone who is looking for any excuse to escape herself, so she turns to art instead of love. When Nina dies -- because of course she dies -- it's in adulation after finishing her performance, and the movie presents this as a triumph, too. The movie believes that death is the reward for her art, the one way she'll be remembered. Maybe it even believes death is the best thing those like us, who live under otherness' umbra, can get -- that only artists who burn out are to be remembered, that picking up the pieces or moving on isn't a thing of wonder, too. I can't help but think of the trans women trapped within this same paradigm, the endless lineage of my sisters who struggled in life and soared in death. I can't help but think of the ways we both struggled with our own hard-won desires to live. But while Black Swan pools with hate for us like a bee's nest pools with honey, you loved the film and I loved you, so as much as I can intellectualize against it, I must speak of it with love, too. I watched it with you, after all -- breathed in your loamy scene next to me, MacBook balanced between our legs, you holding me like I couldn't slip away. Watching it felt like a way to get closer. It wasn't until I rewatched it alone, years later, that I even saw what was wrong with the film, its own cruelty. It wasn't until later that I realized the messiness of the devotion we had. I've focused on misery for long enough, so when I speak now, I want to speak only of lives happy from the jump, horizons unflecked with fear and selves intact. But to remove fear is to remove pain and to remove pain is to fumigate the cracks in which we live until nothing can live, and I refuse that cruelty, too. I refuse to show our lives less painful but less lived -- the opposite of Aronofsky's film, which shows a life filled with pain but absent of anything that indicates Nina is living. I refuse the cruelty of hating the other or the cruelty of wanting to redeem the other through labor or the cruelty of delimiting the other through the shaky dichotomy of the abject. I refuse the obsessive dedication to at the expense of selfhood that Aronofsky argues is the closest way to artistic or romantic success, the idea that death is the ultimate cumulation of that dedication. I refuse the notion that alone or not, people can't change, they just fester.

Uncanny Valley Girls: Essays on Horror, Survival, and Love by Zefyr Lisowski (2025, Harper Perennial)

[librarycards]

“Leslie Feinberg lived with late-stage Lyme disease and fought violent transphobic and ableist medical exclusion for years in hir attempts to access care. Many Stonewall warriors live(d) CPTSD then from surviving constant transmisogynist violence, rape, abuse, and shunning. This is a disabled trans knowledge too. If we look for disability in the Stonewall Rrebellion, might it mean that we stop forgetting disability, thinking of it as a forever footnote or afterthought? Might it mean that we have more queer disabled wordhouses, tools, strategies, ways of imagining how we fight now, for the future that tastes like free than we need? If we do this, I want it to also mean that we don’t shun the Mad—and sick, and slow, and D(d)eaf, and weird, and crip, queer, trans, Two Spirit, and intersex folks in our lives and communities, especially those that are trans Black and brown women—but value and look to the disabled queer and trans knowledge we share, that might be what keeps us all alive. To doing the often hard-as-fuck, messy work of not exiling everyone who is not pretty and normal and popular—to really and truly figuring out how to not leave anyone behind. To remember and celebrate and continue the disabled queer methodologies of being real, and of making care teams, soup brigades, medical advocacy, and visiting your friend on Rikers and the nuthouse.”

— Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Disability Justice/Stonewall’s Legacy, or: Love Mad Trans Black Women When They Are Alive and Dead, Let Their Revolutions Teach Your Resistance All the Time.