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The more you stare into the void, the more you start to notice the pieces that are missing. The structures which created our current social roles are built out of duct tape, string, and haphazard beaming, all of which threatens to crumble at the slightest brush of the shoulder. Escaping this maze of lies is possible, it just requires a little push on your part. This list is here to encourage you to make that push.
The Missing: J.J. Macfield and the Island of Memories
Trapped in the land of moose doctors and spiders with knives, J.J. must dismember and reassemble her body to escape an obstacle course from hell. But this course was not built by a god, devil, or indescribable lovecraftian being. J.J. climbs a mountain of impossible gender expectations built by us, fitting her body into spaces it never belonged just to survive. None of it makes any sense, and that's the point. Her escape is a reminder: we created this nonsensical place, we can dismantle it.
Celeste
Never forget that trans people can double jump. This is a threat.
LesbiAnts - Our New Morphology
Do you know that made-up story about a student using a litter box in a U.S. school? I swear I've heard about it every few months for the last 4 years. In a culture fucking obsessed with cat-girls, it's one of the lies about trans people that gets to me the most. Like, someone had to go out of their way to make this up. There was zero evidence of it happening, meaning the whole story came from their brain. It tells me that when they are not harassing trans people, these assholes are jerking off to hentai cat-girls drinking milk in their basement of shame.
Word of advice to these folks: I'm sure if you lightened up a bit, got a hobby that wasn't harassing trans people, and went out some more you might find a real cat-person to do that for you. They might even actually love you. But I know you won't. The rage is too self-righteous and profitable. So enjoy rehashing the same horseshit to get angry over for the millionth time.
Anyway, the lesbians are ants now. They're also pretty horny. At least people can't make up bullshit litter box stories about them.
Guilty Gear Strive
It was 2023 when my friend Fran died. I lost touch with her after dropping out of grad school a year prior, but had assumed she was doing fine. She had this amazing ability to get to the heart of what was bothering you. Cutting through the bullshit, she listened whether the cause was pettiness or long-held trauma. I figured someone with such a deft navigation of weighty, emotional conversations would be on pretty steady footing themselves.
I failed to cut through the bullshit. I lost a friend.
The week she died, I picked up Guilty Gear Strive and played 40 hours exclusively as Bridget. The way she embodied joy in her every movement, whether swinging a yo-yo or smashing her ass into someone's unsuspecting face, felt infectious. It felt needed. It felt like her joy was bringing Fran back to life. But I failed to cut through the bullshit again.
It's not that Bridget wasn't happy, but that her happiness came with it's own host of baggage and constraints. If Bridget admitted that she was happy dressing as a girl because she was a girl, would her town go back to killing twin boys? Would they even accept that she was a girl in the first place? Lost in these questions, she holds her feelings in for years.
Fran's writing explored abandonment. In particular, she was interested in the ways traumas could linger in places that were largely forgotten. I sometimes wonder if she felt forgotten. Behind her smile and gentle words laid something I will never know, abandoned by me, but lingering for her.
Bridget was lucky. Goldlewis and Ky knew to check in. They knew that poking through her thin veneer was as simple as asking a question. They did not abandon her. They are not left with the lingering.
Bitch Hell
Do you ever just want to uuurrrrggggUURURUUGUGUGUUARUDFAFURUURURUFURUUE RAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH FUUUUUUUCCCCKKKKKKKK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK!
This one is for you. Smash faces, embrace the meeeaaattttt.
Traumacore Violence
See above but with more trauma, less meat, and an ungodly amount of teddy bears.
He Fucked the Girl Out of Me
It's a reminder from the past of what is sure to become our future. They want to rip away our access to housing, healthcare, and even our ability to drive for one simple reason: they want to fuck us. Sex work has never left the trans community, many of us still do it to survive. But (in the U.S. at least), a lot of us are in better positions that we were 20 years ago. We have leverage in our sex work, power we can exert when things get uncomfortable. Housing protections, informed consent, and drivers license changes all give us a little bit more autonomy.
But they want to fuck us. Not as equals, partners, or even just consenting flings. We must be their fuckdolls, unable to say no to their most demeaning desires.
It was always about control. We must never forget why they want to control us. They want a desperate haze over our community so access to resources comes with guaranteed sexual violence. No matter your gender, they want to fuck it out of you.
EyeOS
We aren't trying to trans your children.
There is, however, a class of rich asshole trying to absorb your whole child's life into the computer so they can monitor their every thought and action for profit. Maybe it's just me, but that sounds a lot more like groomer behavior than trans just people existing in public.
Anyway, fellas, is wanting to date an ephemeral genderless entity trapped in a computer kinda gay?
Apocryphauna
The first time I had a positive brush with queer gender expression was in Guild Wars. Starting the game, the goth as fuck necromancer immediately caught my eye. The jagged edges and aggressively popped collar screamed 'home' to me. I was told it was a look for edge-lords, but found blood sacrifices to be only tangentially related to my thirst for queer fashion.
I was lucky, I grew up in a family where gender expression could be freely explored. Guild Wars would not be my last run-in with queerness as a kid. However, many kids are not given the same space, and so they must cherish what they have.
Apocryphauna understands what it feels like to have all your options taken away. Having been put in a strict religious school for 'deviant' behavior, the player must find a way to live in a place that wishes to choke life out of them. Unable to express yourself in an openly queer fashion, you instead find solace by searching for a full deck of Apocryphauna cards. In your search, the cards give access to forbidden knowledge and the ability to 'invert' your gender presentation. They give you a way to live with slightly more freedom in your new hellish home. Try as the school might to change you, you know who you are.
Conversion therapy has never worked, all it has done is make us miserable. But even in this misery, we have managed to find joy and resistance. I was lucky, being part of a family where my queerness was not shamed. But I know, even if I was admonished and sent away, I would have found a way back to myself.
A Night for Flesh and Roses
It is every conservative's nightmare. The dreaming hellscape of every person who wondered if, this time, the transgenders have gone too far. It is not people identifying as trees, or bears, or even cats. Instead, it is bodily autonomy growing to extremes that would make Cronenberg shiver. Maybe you have three legs and an external rib-cage. Maybe you have no bones at all. Perhaps you are just a mound of quivering flesh and muscle. In this place, your body is, truly, whatever you want it to be.
It is beautiful.
I've been thinking a lot more about the kinds of bodies I feel comfortable around and why. Despite all my efforts, some queer bodies still give me a deep sense of unease. I tell myself all bodies are beautiful and cover my walls with art displaying the wide variance in the human form. Yet something deep within me rejects my own stance whenever someone pushes their body "too far."
Rua Williams calls this reaction Metaeugenics, "the undercurrent of cultural norms, ideals, values, and demands that warp and twist deviant bodies into conformity via a desperate drive for survival and future." I own my own deviant body, but feel the need to reject others to conform to some level of "respectability" and protect my ability to survive.
A Night for Flesh and Roses imagines a space built by and for people who wholly reject the forces of metaeugenics. It is a space where one can live without any of our normative sensory experiences and still find pleasure, where bodies contort into every shape not for grotesque gawking, but to celebrate the many forms a human can take. I hope one day I can join them.