kate 2025 trans cendence
Nearly twenty years old, kate is a feminist and queer-friendly zine produced by students within Otterbein University’s Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies program. Over the years, kate has become a platform for intersectional and interdisciplinary discourse, where students creatively express their perspectives on gender, sexuality, identity, and justice. Each issue documents evolving conversations within our community while pushing the boundaries of feminist and queer storytelling.
kate thrives on collaboration and collective creativity. Each year, the editorial team selects a theme that sparks dialogue, reflection, and artistic exploration. This zine captures the spirit of radical inclusivity, challenging dominant narratives by highlighting voices often pushed to the margins. It is a space where creativity and critical thinking come together to shape a zine that resonates with both personal and collective experiences.
This year, we explore the concept of Trans•cendence. We understand Trans•cendence in the broadest sense possible. It encompasses a spectrum of experiences, identities, and imaginings, reflecting a commitment to uplifting stories of change, survival, and transformation. Whether it means transcending oppressive systems, redefining the self, or imagining new futures for marginalized communities, the theme calls for creativity and vision.
The work in this zine begins to center on transgender experience stories of resilience, joy, survival, and self-actualization. It reflects on moving past restrictive ideas about gender and sexuality, and it documents large and small transformations of the self. It explores liberating ideas about the divine, and reimagines political and social movements.
It gives us a chance to dream beyond systems that have limited us.
Marlo Young
I Sent My Body To Heaven so that the filthy hands of Earth wouldn’t touch me.
I know she will be safe there. She will be healed. She will be whole
In church, pastor said We'd have our bodies sent to heaven when it was time. That God would reach down with his right hand and lift us good souls to heaven. He said it would be magnificent. I should have listened.
My body was sinking into the ground. Slinking under church pews as a child. Now woman, I wish to melt into the carpet once again. I am forced to face the voice of Men alongside the broken bodies of others.
I shed a tear, for I have grown to learn, tis easier for us to dwell in ground or sky than in life.
I wrap my body tightly so the package will not be ruined. Breasts push against cotton; stomach pokes from denim. Stomach is the problem, must grab a belt. Will not matter; he will take anyway.
I should have listened. Should have prepared my body better.
For the holy ritual, the holy ascension.
I write a note with lipstick
To whoever protects the Women. Keep her safe. Make her whole.
Package has been intercepted.
Cotton ripped away; denim torn apart
Body is gone; but the silent prayer remains Keep Her Safe. Make Her Whole.
The package is sent on.
The protector of women furious at the mishandling of the package they so deeply treasure.
The middleman cries “Have mercy...”
(“Lord, have mercy on us” the congregation speaks)
The body is stitched crudely together; and the powers who watch over women close her wounds
But their cries can be heard for eternity.
They cause the hands from earth to reach up, dreary eyes to look heavenward.
My young girl body staring at the rafters from the church floor.
The body is protected now. I should have listened then.... And so the horrific echo rings out
Keep her safe. Make her whole.
Dear Mother of the Earth,
I am weary, and I fear that my strength may falter. I have been addressing my pain for so long that I worry it will consume me, like a wave eroding the shore, pulling the ground from beneath me and casting me adrift into the abyss. Yet, this is not a letter of surrender. It is a place to lay my head at your breast, to press my ear to the pulse of the earth, hoping that in writing this, you will cradle me with your infinite embrace.
I carry an honorable burden, but it weighs upon my spirit. It reminds me that my journey is not mine alone. Like those before me, I endure stretched across time like an unbroken tree, with roots never gracing the land of true peace at least, not in this body.
Why did you make me a beacon, only to place so few to answer its call? Why must I walk this path illuminated by so much light, but warmed by so little? My fear is not just mine; it is the echo of my ancestors’ voices, whispering of the hard road ahead. They cheer for me, but their love carries a solemn warning. Why must I know the cruelty of this world so intimately? Why did you make me a force of nature, only to be met with hatred and resistance?And yet, Gaia, I have glimpsed deliverance not in pews echoing with hollow sermons, but in the raw, unbreakable act of vulnerability. I found it in third spaces, in rooms where survival itself becomes sacred.
The first time I stepped into a ballroom in New York City, I saw Black queer people who looked and sounded like me. It was like meeting the divine incarnate. Euphoria coursed through me an electric liturgy of chanting, dancing, rhythm. It was ancestral, as if an ancient language I had once known had rediscovered me not in my mind, but in my body. My heart remembered what this world, what Trump, tries to silence.
We exist because our Black queer ancestors survived. Sharing breath, laughter, movement, and story with those who still endure is the holiest of communions. It is righteousness. It is transcendence. It is validation not just in thought, but in presence. We breathe, we vogue, we are loud, we are femme, we are Black, queer, they/them, pussy, magic, and joy. We are divine, and our survival is proof.
To anyone who reads this if you are not Gaia, know this: Bad faith is born from the weight of knowing what must be done while feeling paralyzed by fear of what may come. I urge you do not lean solely on your own understanding. Have faith in those who endured before you. Let your endurance be the bridge for those yet to come. The harder the journey, the closer you are to purpose. One day, when you have fought your fight, youwill be closer to those who came before you their peace, their hope, and their dreams fulfilled through your survival. Without the fight for third spaces, fellowship remains impossible.
This is what it means to be a good ancestor today to be revered, remembered, and reborn tomorrow.
With all that I am,
Sincerely, your Child of Endurance, Agape
My Sister, Femininity
Zahara Rahi
My sister, femininity – what an image of grace and beauty is she!
She is every continent of her name, she is every bit strong as she is brave, she is every bit breathtaking as she is alive.
My sister, femininity – what comradery I share with thee! Our bond deeper than means of sisterhood, connected by a path longer than personhood. She is part of my heart, quintessential to my being. We hold hands along every step of this journey, The trials, tribulations – the venture of womanhood.
Our venture of, womanhood.
My sister, femininity – how intertwined are we! Connecting pieces of a greater mystery, Together, we will create new histories. Oh, how together we ascend what is written!
We are existential. We are beautiful. Born with a soul that was always more woman, than it ever was, God.
My sister, femininity – our love was always meant to be! It was fate that brought us together, and it is fate that shall carry us along. I’m in this for life with my sister, no matter what the outside noise is saying because together, we belong.
My sister, femininity – I will always fail to see How the world could want to hurt her, how people could sit and force her plea.
My sister, she’s hardworking, She’s smart, she’s kind, she’s stunning. Her presence is the greatest I know, Yet they still Want To Hurt Her
My sister, femininity – I will never rest until she’s free Her blood, is my blood her fight is my fight. Because that’s what a sister does.
My sister, femininity – is in the stall next to me We walk out, four eyes gazing into the same mirror I ask her if she has a cotton round, She is happy to oblige. I stare back at my sister femininity, and I tell her she looks pretty
Zahara Rahi
A letter to...
Karina Streeter
It is March 17th, 2025, and we have switched over to an administration that has no intention of protecting the people who need it the most. We turn it over to fascist leadership that will try to destroy our forms of peace and protection. This letter is my time capsule of how I will imagine, imagine to build, build to create, and create to organize communities, communities where our togetherness is most important There must be room for imagination to make ourselves visible When I say visibility, I mean it in a microcosmic sense; it will reach those on the local level: the local legislature, the local magazines, the WGSS classrooms, and our communities of friends. Our own microcosmic spaces are the hands that will piece us together.
I have found comfort and some peace through your frameworks that help guide me. I am finding ways to express joy when the world is asking a lot of indescribable questions. I look to you in the shadows of our future, and I find tranquility in the evenings I share with my roommates Isaac and Aeri. I find tranquility when I talk to my professors about the work I want to produce, and the ways I can contribute to their classroom discussions. I produce work not only for myself, but for the ways it acts as a form of information and a form of resistance. There is no me without my voice and I have found a voice through reading and discussing the voices who have come before me.
I speak now to the reading where some of our queer ancestors share their stories One of the questions I have been asking myself is how do we further dream when a large part of our country has turned itself over to an oppressive administration Firstly I want to begin with the fact that these oppressive systems, social they will always be here, a explore the ways to fight t . Johnson and Sylvia Rivera
uestion. In Calafell's essay “Narrative sh,” and the fight over The Death and she acknowledges that Johnson was ivists who was a pioneer in LGBTQ of the leaders of the rebellion at New York City’s Stonewall Inn in 1969” ( 27). Johnson and Rivera created their own community, and one of their communities they created was the Strategic Trans Alliance for Radical Reform (STARR) which became a space for “radical coalition building” (26). When history wanted to erase their identities, they created their own. Calafell notes how Alison Reeds thought of there being a “colorblindness” to queer theory and queer history where certain complexities about trans activists of color were/are being left out (35). The disregarding of a part of someone’s identity can overlo their identity as a whole. Calafell writes, “until all of our ideas a lives are celebrated and given the resources we need and deserve much of our brilliance will remain hidden out of fear of our lives and labor being violated and appropriated” (30). One of the way Calafell argues this framework is through David France’s documentary. France looks at Johnson as a queer victim instead her complexities that revealed the violence she experienced and activism she harbored. Again, Calafell examines, “although it is imperative that we recognize and act against the violence against transwomen of color, it is also necessary to honor the joy they experience as a way to push back against images of the tragic queer” (36). In the critique of France in Calafell’s essay, we can explore the ways that we can explore and understand our capacity of joy. In understanding our joy there becomes space for knowledge of each other's complexities and a reminder of the feeling behind those complexities. In honoring their joy and the understanding our own; it becomes a form of resistance: “we mine existing archives and create new ones to address how our relationship with the past shapes our understanding of the present. We look back in order to dream a way forward” (29). Calafell is doing somethi here.
She understands the importance of dreaming; in dreaming we create spaces that were never meant for us, and we announce ourselves for who we are and not for who society wants us to be. Our bodies become a site of memory, so I look back to remember.
yours, karina streeter
Shards in my Skin
Katie Deeter
My work is my attempt to show the anxiety that can come from being born in a body. To some people how their body was shaped when they were born is a source of power, but sometimes those features can feel like shards on your soul. Whether due to body image or gender issues, bodies are complicated things to comprehend and feel comfortable in.
Untitled
This is the first time I’ve ever written about this I never thought about naming it as a “trans experience” until recently. The first time I began to consider my gender, I was about eleven or twelve years old. The first and last person I ever told about it was my mom, because I knew she wouldn’t tell my dad, but I also knew she would never believe me. And I remember her sigh, and her asking me “Is this going to be something I should worry about?”
The answer to that question was an obvious no. Already there was a need to not burden my family that would always win out over any way I might have felt, even at that age. After all, during that time my mom was already busy enough handling a new teenager in my older sister, and, as she did then and still has to do now, making sure our father had nothing to get upset over (I didn’t need to be told how he would feel about me even beginning to question my gender, and the choice between continuing that line of thought and keeping the peace in my family was an easy one).
And maybe my willingness to give up that easily proved that, at that time, it was only a phase, but more and more often, I think about that phrasing: something to have to worry about. I wonder if I would have been similarly worn down over time even if I did insist on how I felt, made always aware of the strains that a trans child would undoubtedly bring upon our family, especially the emotional kinds: I know I would be constantly reminded of how difficult I made things for others, and that this would be followed by “…but I still love and support you.” I know there would always be an underlying, thinly-veiled desire for me to change my mind, and I know there never would have been unconditional support. I don’t remember bringing it up again, but that feeling never really went away, just changed as I got older. For a few years I was able to
ignore it, not expected to look or act particularly feminine I didn’t have to like being a girl, I just had to be one. That seemed to work well enough in the eyes of my parents: it did not go against our religion, and there were plenty of women in our family who were, perhaps unbeknownst to themselves, quite obviously unhappy in their womanhood. The way I squared it for a few years was “not trans, just not very feminine.” That was the furthest I would allow myself to go, the idea of even considering my identity any further felt too close to disappointing my family.
Only within the past year or so have I felt like I could, and should name myself as something other than cisgender, though I’m still trying to figure out the specifics. Sometimes it feels too overwhelming to handle. I still worry about what my family would think, but I know I’m tired of always living within their boundaries. I want to feel happy being myself at last. I want to choose my own happiness without feeling selfish for it, whatever that happiness might look like.
A letter to my Alan,
How I anger for you. I yearn for you to see who I am todaya pupil in your mere shadow of excellence. I breathe because of your works. I see love, hope. I see the life that you never had.
Your historical recount ruins me. To understand your greatness in disjoint from your logical prowls makes me burn to move forward with my searchings for your life in detail. To leave us knee deep in red scareish times, before the world of fight in the 1970s followed by the great tragedies of the HIV epidemic in the 80s- why must you leave us so soon?
Why do my mentors skew from your sexual desire so much? Is it to keep you holy in their minds, to push you far away from these ideas of passiveness deeply engraved with our existence as homosexuals. Sure, they can keep playing their little purity games of you in their head- attended
to greatly by historical bouts of emasculating riddling detail which only interests me further. Your sexuality may have been lost to the ever-standing battle of time, but it remains a proven fact of your lived bodily experience.
I need to blossom for you, Alan. To start the great tradition and embracement of femininity within us as mathematicians. To be able to engage with these deeply dismembering pressures of gender and sex, to cross dress publicly and without remorse. I find myself out, crossdressing on the town for the hope of a new future for people like us, Alan. In an age where we can thrive, innovate, move and explore ourselves on a deeper level. Where we can love ourselves in the same way we adore our work on chalkboards. To study our bodies, our movements, our subconscious wants as the most detailed function of desire. I wish to find myself there, just as I’m sure you would have all those decades ago.
To be liberated not from ourselves, but from those around us.
You puzzle me, Alan. But I also puzzle myself in the same form. Who are we? Why are we? Who could we be if we did not have those others at our podium, claiming peer-ship only to cause our ruin. Why must our love for math be blinded by our adoration of our natural and incumbent desires. We are not overindulged, we are human.
Your story entrances me, for reasons aplenty. Alan, I know you had the words to make claim to who you were. My life in ways parallels yours to an uncanny. Our minds were never as sharp as the blade which cut us down.
Who were you? Not your accomplishments, but your nature and mind? Alan, I know a surprisingly little amount about your enjoyments and pleasures in life. How did you dress? Whom did you call your lovers? Why must we wipe away your fascinations with the distractions of your accomplishing acts.
Moreover, I wonder why you would even contribute to the greater society who cared so little about your weight of life.
How did you even make it this far, judging as your fagginess had been ‘“written on [the] face and body,’” a curse I also bear in this field of discovery and computation (More, 58). How did you do it? How did you go everyday of your life facing a magnified level of the same judgement I can hardly bear? Perchance you simply avoided effeminacy as I did in the pastimprisoned by the potential of our futures.
Madness. Confusion. Castration. All of which are terms I use to think of the final few years of your life.
Your death was not the suicide we commonly speak on, but a proxy of your status of identity. Just as your tragic death was deemed suicide, the blood of your legislative torturers escaped blood off their hands.
Just as Marsha’s mysterious death was deemed “suicide,” you were a clear martyr for our progression as queered people- a victim of the never-ending cycle of abuse we live and breathe (Calafell, 2). This all raises a larger question to me: why do I even know who you are Alan? Yes, your martyrdom is kept in relative secrecy, but your praise in computational science- it had to have been magnified by your whiteness. The casted pedestal of hetero of which you’ve been placed on has been a thing of beauty in though, but a protection of cis, white, and masculinity within my journey of discovering science as a queered body.
This is by no means your fault, Alan. Current men in computing find themselves in a whirlpool of emasculation- and finding historical white men of whom they can personify to gain some form of footing in the field. I wonder how you feel about this Alan- why do you feel like your work is idolized to the point of fetishization by these vehemently conservative men? Do you get the same rush I do? The unmatched adrenaline of besting those above you in the hierarchy of power; if anything, the clear sign of a lack of decentering those voices of which put you in this position of weakness in the first place. Honestly Alan, I think I know about you partially for your greatness, but also due to your status as a white scientist in the 1940s. I wonder who else you worked with, whose story you superseded to prevail as the leader of computation. I wonder if, as France puts it in an interview, how your “white supremacy ... create a barrier to entry for that community to tell their own stories” (Calafell, 7).
Although I may question your fame, I still idolize you, Alan. I have fallen victim to the sole vision of your life to form my goals and aspirations in computing- and there’s really nothing you could’ve done to halt that from happening. Your story is tragic, but your projection of a nearly theological title within our field of study is not a coincidence, nor is it particularly your responsibility to correct. Your fame, although important, was only magnified by most white men who find your potential masculinity and certain caucasianess validating to their ever-shrinking value of themselves. And even though I worship you similarly in this trap, I instead was blinded by the potential of our parallel sexualities and passions. Although my fog of infatuation has begun to part, it still casts your life in rose-colored glasses to my mind.
I initially worshipped you with a blinding passion, but I now study your life for what it was, not what it could’ve been.
With the best intentions, Kyle Miller
Citations
Calafell, B. M. (2019). Narrative authority, theory in the flesh, and the fight overthe death and life of Marsha P. Johnson. QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, 6(2), 26–39. https://doi.org/10.14321/qed.6.2.0026
Meyer, M. (2002). The signifying invert: Camp and the performance of 19th-century sexology. In Archaeologies of posing (pp. XX-XX). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315816243
Bioqueen
“That’s not drag. It’s not the same, ”
Is my art invalid because you don’t “get it”?
“Stay out of the faggot lane”
Is a queer woman less queer for being a woman?
“But there’s no transformation”
Does my corset not cinch me the same?
Or does it simply bear the weight of womanhood?
Hyperdrag
Bioqueen
Why the specification?
Boxes are the death of art. Is the point of all this not to reject those very same boxes?
I am not the label you assign to me, A queen is a queen whether respected or not, And I hold my crown high.
Ellyse Gallagher
exploring lesbianism as gender identity ava borromeo
i have been out as a lesbian for six years now and it wasn’t until i felt comfortable with my sexuality that i begun delving into gender exploration. in terms of societal understanding, the concept of womanhood is centered on relationships with men. the ideal woman is white, cishet, and middle class or wealthy. in truth, the definition of ‘woman’ is incredibly broad and with an intersectional lens we can understand that people’s relationship toward womanhood is impacted by many things; judith butler sums it up nicely in her book Gender Trouble, “if one “is” a woman, that is surely not all one is; the term fails to be exhaustive, not because a pregendered “person” transcends the specific paraphernalia of its gender, but because gender is not always constituted coherently or consistently in different historical contexts, and because gender intersects with racial, class, ethnic, sexual, and regional modalities of discursively constituted identities,” (Gender Trouble, p. 4). there are many women who would not equate their gender identity towards relationships with men, but in a hegemonic heteronormative society it is clear that ‘woman’ is defined by the centering of men.
the history of the lesbian identity can often be related to TERFS or trans-exclusionary lesbians. there has been many discourses on who gets to claim lesbian as their sexuality. the most common definition of ‘lesbian’ is women who are exclusively attracted to other women. the traditional definition falls in line with homonormativity and excludes anything that could be deemed queer. my understanding though is any non-man attracted to other non-men. with this definition, nonbinary lesbians, trans lesbians, he/him lesbians, etc. are happily welcomed and celebrated; this queers the definition of ‘lesbian’. the difference between queering lesbian vs. the traditional definition is the aspect of inclusion and exclusion. in discourse it is common to see the
policing of those who identify as lesbian but may not resemble the cookie cutter lesbian that society deems as okay. monique wittig is famous for her declaration that “lesbians are not women”. for wittig, she views lesbians as existing separate from categories of man and woman because of their sexuality and lack of dependence on men. lesbians are excluded from the class of woman because they lack traits that determine what a woman is. wittig’s claim is very black and white as it excludes lesbians from femininity altogether. there is no one way to describe how a lesbian would define their gender identity and wittig’s claim is exclusionary in the way that it still enforces the gender binary. for me personally, i feel like my relationship with womanhood was always performative. after learning about butler’s work on gender it was clear to me that my history of being socialized as a woman was heavily influenced by performance. butler states that acts of gender is an act of doing, so if a child was assigned female at birth then they would be influenced by socialization, culture, and norms; this act would be considered “girling” with the opposite being “boying”. for me though, i am very observant and i notice what others around me are doing and if i need to start acting like them to appear “normal” in a sense. so, i’ve found that a lot of actions i’ve taken to show that i am a true girl or woman has been just an act of “girling”. when i was younger i understood myself as straight and then identified as bisexual from freshman year of high school to my junior year. expressing my identity as a woman always felt like i was defining myself with the male gaze: ‘will my outfit impress any of the boys in my classes?’or doing my makeup and following clothing trends that fit within the heteronormative culture for example. once identifying with lesbianism, i started to decenter men which led to me expressing my gender identity in a way that felt right to me rather than performing for attention from men.
as of now, i would say that my gender identity is heavily influenced by my identification with lesbian as my sexuality and therefore my gender is lesbian (under the nonbinary umbrella). in this sense, i feel like i can confidently understand and express myself without the shackles of the binary. this is not to say that identifying as a woman or trans woman is wrong; the gender binary can be something that people truly feel connected to and i do not want to discount that experience, especially for trans folk. this gender identity gives me the freedom to explore different ways to express myself and find something that i feel aligned with.
my gender expression does not have to fall under androgyny 100% of the time even if i do not feel aligned with defining myself as a woman. sometimes i present more femme because i enjoy dressing up and accessorizing. i like to find outfits that combine both features of femininity and masculinity and in this i feel i am representing my truest self. i find myself feeling upset over the size of my boobs. they are currently the biggest they have been and often times i wish they were velcro attached so i could utilize them only when desired. they can get in the way of how i truly wish to present myself but then on days when i feel more femme they flow better with the way i am expressing myself. all of this is to say that there is no “right way” to express one’s gender identity.
gender is heavily influenced by society and culture making it socially constructed in a way. a person’s sex does not determine their gender and while some people feel comfortable aligning with the gender that society assigns based of their sex others do not. the concept of womanhood is incredibly broad and is based on so many factors; there is no one true definition of what a woman is. because womanhood is often regarded in terms of relationships and dependence on men, lesbians have often been exiled from the category of woman all together. just like we cannot fit womanhood in one neat category the same is for lesbians and their
relationship with gender. i have found that the identity of lesbian can be a way to describe one’s sexuality and gender because of the way ‘womanhood’ is defined in a patriarchal society. a lesbian can identify as a woman which is totally valid and at the same time they could identify as nonbinary or understand their gender as dyke/lesbian.
Rebirth framed society
ensnares you in its shadow you will be the stars burning lies, capable of rising from bitter ashes
Morgan Smedley
All The Survivors Have Told Me
I’ve thought of writing you an inspiring manifesto, or perhaps a sentimental piece of poetry. I find, like I have found myself many times this year, stuck in fight or flight with no tangible physical threat. It looms above me, and while sometimes I can rationalize through it, promise not to obey in advance and always stand up for myself, I still find myself exhausted. There is a type of systemic agony that no therapeutic license can fix. You must look after yourself, learn not to catastrophize and remind yourself that in this moment, you are safe. You will stand up. You will be present for yourself, both in playing an active role in your advocacy for yourself and in caring for yourself in moments of rest and recuperation. You must realize that it is intended to torture you, to scare you, to discourage you. You must tend yourself, and walk on. Walk on even if the pace is slow at times. Walk on with the support of others. We cannot do this alone. I am happiest and safest amongst my cherished ones, those who see me, those who I see back. We lean on each other, we must in order to survive. I find myself looking to lawyers and judges as moments of joy within my day. Someone hasn’t forgotten our fundamental rights. I think even more of our grassroots efforts, which those who oppress try so desperately to stop. There wouldn’t be such pressure to stop us if we weren’t doing something important, something effective. I find now that I cherish my life more than I ever have, because I am acutely aware of how fragile everything on this planet is. You must stay alive. The future is ours.
I want to give you a small list of things I’ve kept in mind these past few months for the sake of your well-being and the well-being of others, in hopes we can live to the fullest and protect ourselves. These are in no particular order, they are simply a combination of my lived experience and solid advice I have been given from others' lived experience:
Be intelligent. Be safe. Phones can track your location, leave them behind. Write your important information somewhere on your body. Cover your face if you want to, that's not illegal. Do not dress in easily
identifiable clothes. Tell a trusted loved one where you ' re going by word of mouth. You have the right to free speech. That being said:
Shut up. Do not post yourself at protests. Do not create a paper or digital trail for yourself. No one needs to know what you are doing. Do not be tempted by the idea of cheap social glory. It can and will be used against you. Park far from where you are going if you are physically able. Stand up for yourself, be present in person if you so choose, but be intelligent. Be safe. Shut up.
Do not feel guilty if you cannot attend protests. There are other kinds of events. There are other means of helping. You do not have to be the bravest, boldest person in the room. You have to do what you can handle. There are other things to do.
Start local. Start with what’s in your immediate grasp. Make your voice heard in your community. Make your voice heard at town halls, at local meetings. Contact your representatives. Make your actions louder than your words. Volunteer at organizations. Help get information out to others.
No infighting. We are weaker divided. Human rights are called human rights because they are for everyone. Do what you can. Yes, you. Maybe you ' re a great organizer. Maybe you know how to get people together, to show up for something. Maybe you can drive people to important events. Maybe you ' re great at sharing and distributing information. Maybe you create inspiring artwork. Maybe you do some combination of things. Find where you are most helpful, find what you specifically can do and do it, for your sake and for others.
Support those around you. Support their efforts and their events. Be there for them. Hold them. See them. Spend time with them. Love them. Share resources with them. Share food with them. Share love with them. Be there.
Lean on your community, and let them lean on you. We all have to rest eventually. If we lean on each other, we get through. We cannot do this alone. We do this for us. We do this for ourselves, we do this for our neighbors, we do this for our country, we do this for the world.
You have to rest. You cannot burn the candle at both ends. You are human. We do this together. We all have to pause at points. Your community will be there, and you have to take care of yourself.
Grieve. This is real. You have to feel it. You cannot escape it but you can change it.
Know your limits. Do not torture yourself with the horrible knowledge of the world. It is enough to stay updated. Do not press on, thinking it will magically change or go away. Do not torture yourself. I mean it. The point of it all is to make you miserable and feel hopeless. Acknowledge the information and move past it. Distract yourself if you must. Share what is important to know and go spend time with your community, or pause with yourself. Whatever is needed.
Remind yourself of your surroundings. You are safe. You know where you are. Nothing is going to physically attack you at this moment in time. It is intended to invade your mind. You are here and you have the ability to interact and move amongst the dread.
Cherish everything. Savor it all. Hold it close. Be sentimental. Indulge yourself. Linger. Love. Never deny yourself joys and kindnesses.
You will need to lay down sometimes. You can’t hold it all forever. There will be people there to love you and support you and help you back up. Let it be. Give yourself the time and space for it where you can. You will crumble otherwise.
You must carry on. You must get up. You must join in your community and go with them, no matter what pace you must take to follow. There will be people to lift you, and you will be there to help people. It isn’t as daunting as it seems. You must rest, but you must move. You must take action. You must be there for yourself and your community. The world needs you, and despite its cruelty, is full of people who love you so much.
The world is still full of joy and meaning, even when it seems like there is none. We create it.
Joy cannot be regulated, no matter how hard they try. You loving yourself, you loving others, you taking pride and pleasure and comfort in yourself and your life cannot be controlled. The little joys you find day by day, the personal joys you find in expressing yourself, the communal joys you share with others, the judicial joy of acquiring your demands, every kind of joy is yours. You are a boundless, infinitely capable person. You have the ability to make change. You have the ability to care for yourself and your community. You are not alone. Life is still worth living.
Intellectual
It can be easy to look forward to something difficult. After a certain amount of anxious reflection, self-awareness can come naturally. Seeing yourself smiling back in the glassy pond, putting up one, two, three fingers, waving. After dissecting pictures of yourself like an infirmed detective- shimmying out of what binds and whatever else ails can make the rest look like smooth sailing. No more long walks on short piers. Mothers love diets, love the misery that comes with. Good frustration, productive pain. Productive pain is all that you know. A baggie of ibuprofen and Benadryl in your smallest zipper pocket. They’re different colors. Like candy, with all of the dyes that are apparently ruining my life. Barely food. More plastic, probably. Will outlive me, probably. Years of climbing on the kitchen counter to sneak candy out of the bowl on top of the fridge- why play Halloween if the spoils hide higher than your tiny tiptoes? You don’t forget to ask questions you’ll never find answers to. Look intellectual. Look normal. Act natural. Know that a lifetime is hardly a lifetime without anger. Wonder about the braindead. Wonder about what lies beyond a lifetime. Know it’s pointless to wonder about questions you’ll never have the answers to, but wonder nonetheless. Make a lifetime of it. Pretending to be an intellectual. Reflecting. Wondering, feeling, winding knowledge like tickertape around your fingers. Sensing the eyes of a million judging beetles every time you crash through the brush trying to be authentic or a hippie or something. Or something. Writing poems pretending to be relatable. Finding universality in the specific. Pretentiously bright. Obnoxiously intellectual.
Julia Zetlmeisl
To Those Who’ve Come Before
For my eighteenth-century British literature class, we had to read a section on women and power. One of the pieces we had to read was the Female Husband by Henry Fielding Fielding based the work on a man named Charles Hamilton who, in 1746, was tried in court after his wife, Mary Price, reported that he was not a man, but a woman living as one. Fielding changed Charles’s name to George and published the most sensationalized story about Hamilton that you can imagine, all taken from newspaper and gossip in the town of Taunton Throughout the story he calls Hamilton things, such as “monstrous” and “unnatural.” He tells the readers about how Hamilton preys on unsuspecting women, convincing them to marry him.
The familiarity of these statements shook me Over and over again, throughout my life, I have heard the exact same phrasing used for queer people The same arguments have been made for nearly three hundred years. These tired old hostilities have been repeated generation after generation, traumatizing everyone whose path they have crossed; forever altering their brain chemistry and thought processes about themselves
For me, it is insidious. I have been plagued by the word predatory. The word itself is used rarely, but the intent is all the same- from my father telling me that lesbians tried to steal his wife, to the bleach blonde sorority girl who told me she was okay with lesbians (as long as they didn’t try to hit on her). It’s seeped into my consciousness, making me weary of everything around me Every move I make, every glance I make towards a woman, I berate myself. I’m constantly questioning if I have crossed a boundary, wondering if I have made her uncomfortable. I have spent days in anguish turning conversations around in my head
The boundaries I have made for myself extreme and unnecessary: Eyes above the collarbone “Pretty” and “beautiful” are acceptable compliments, “hot” or “ sexy ” are not. Never make the first move, wait until there is repeated confirmation Never assume that she is interested How many relationships have I missed? How many connections were lost? How many people thought that I did not want to be their friend or want their company? I don’t know, but I’m sure it’s countless. I am not alone in this Trans women are seen as predatory, only transitioning to sexually assault women in the bathroom. Gay men are brutally beaten for even looking at a man This idea of queerness being predatory has created cavernous rifts in our community. Bisexual and pansexual people are isolated from the community because they aren’t gay enough, don’t experience enough oppression. What is enough oppression? Isn’t any oppression too much?
As I read the words Fielding put down to paper, I couldn’t help but realize this is a generational trauma for queer individuals How many centuries of queer folks have repressed their desire? Diverted their eyes in the exact same way I have? Did they also do the calculations in their head of who is safe? Who could they be themselves? Did they too fear for their lives in the face of bigotry? They didn’t even have the words to describe their feelings.
There have always been queer spaces throughout time The first coming to mind being the Institute for Sexual Research run by Magnus Hirschfeld, created in 1919 It was the first transgender clinic in the world and was the home of the first modern gender-affirming surgeries. It was a place of community and acceptance Hirschfeld accepted not only trans people who fit in the binary, but gender non-conforming people, saying that it was in their nature.
It was a beautiful, joy-filled place in early twentieth century Berlin. When I look at the pictures of the people that were a part of that community it brings tears to my eyes; I feel so deeply connected to people that I have never met. They had the community we have always desired and deserved. Unfortunately, it came to an end with the rise of Nazi Germany where in addition to Jewish, Roma, Soviet, and Polish citizens gay and trans people were targeted. On May 6th, 1933, Nazis stormed the institute and burned 20,000 books- all of which were on sexuality or transgender studies. Rare and irreplaceable, they were eradicated the way the Nazis tried to eradicate the queer community of 1930s Berlin. It’s horrifying and terrifying. A decade of community destroyed in a matter of hours. The picture of the book burning is etched into my brain. It comes up more and more with the state of our country today: the countless bans barring transgender people from going to the bathroom, playing sports, and transitioning. Gross misinformation is being spread throughout the country. I feel a different type of connection to the queer people of 1930s Berlin, a type of solidarity. I don’t pray to God, but hell, I’ve considered praying to them. I want to ask them how they got through it. I want to know their wisdom, their hope.
I don’t know where this is going. I don’t know how we are going to survive, but I know we always have. We always will. We have generations of queer individuals who have lived through this and survived. I will read their poetry, listen to their stories, sift through their pictures, yellowed with age. I will hope and I will build community and connection even if I’ve only met one queer person past the age of forty (to the victims of the AIDS epidemic: I remember you). I will take the strength of all the queer people throughout history and simply keep living.
support someone I love, a step that has been met with a mix of tentative support and bewildered silence. It is so odd that I went all this way to show love & support & I received this scrap make of care back. I am now sitting on a couch writing to you on the 12th of March with tons of regret. Yet, as I said before there is this large ray of sunlight bursting out of me because I had a great interview with Dr. McCubbins and I feel good about getting into the program there. It is a personal upheaval that mirrors the broader currents in the United States, where debates over bodily autonomy and identity rage on abortion bans tightening in some states, while others enshrine protections for trans youth. What strikes me as most memorable is the resilience of queer communities & black communities, who, despite rising hate crimes, keep carving out spaces of joy and resistance I think you would find this tenacity familiar, a across time. To be a good ancestor, I w archive not just the struggle but the stu that we are still here, still fighting, still f f it ll
tion grapples wit
The aftermath of recent climate disast Southeast, wildfires in the West has vulnerability is distributed, a truth you w from your own battles against systemi struck by the grassroots mutual aid ne often led by queer and feminist organi legacy of care amid crisis. What is surp these efforts coexist with a polarized po where empathy seems rationed. Sharing this with you feels vital not just to honor your work but to mark how it ripples forward, urging me to live with intention so the future might find something worth inheriting in my choices.
In my studies, I have been diving into Judith Butler’s Precarious Life, and Chapter 2, "Violence, Mourning, Politics," has hit me hard. One thing that is stuck with me is how Butler frames vulnerability as a shared condition that binds us, yet one we are often taught to deny. She writes, “Loss has made a tenuous ‘ w ’ f ll” (20) Thi li k circling in my mind because personally and collectively Rican decent has made me c in this life that aren’t so grea others who have faced reject feminist ancestor reader, this the solidarities you built in p because it reframes weaknes shame a lesson I want to p the future knows strength is
or scrolling social media, whe bodies, against Black Lives, ag gr y t fast to process. For you, who likely mourned losses the state refused to acknowledge, this might echo your own subversive grief. It is teaching me to sit with pain, to let it fuel action rather than paralysis, and I hope the future finds this letter as evidence of that shift a commitment to feeling deeply as a radical act.
Finally, Butler’s question about who counts as human has unsettled me in the best way. She asks, “Whose lives are mournable, and whose are not?” (32). This cuts to the core of what I have been wrestling with both in class and in life because it forces me to confront how I have internalized hierarchies of worth, even as someone s them. For you, this might spark recogn fights for visibility; for me, it is a call to k gets left out of the frame As an ancesto this knowledge to ma I acted on it, ampl
This letter, then, is a bridge between my small, messy life and the larger currents of 2025, between your struggles and the lessons I am carrying forward. It is a promise to stay awake to both joy and pain, to let vulnerability and grief shape me into someone worth remembering. I hope it finds you proud, and I hope the future finds it useful.
Giving it to the most high, Doc
Sunday, March 16th 2025
Dearest Sam Nordquist,
I feel compelled to express my gratitude for your existence as a trans brother I can look to, and my sorrow for your absence. I wish we could have met; I wish I could have asked you about your hobbies, your loved ones, and how you found joy. I’ve been struggling with the practice of selfcare, which is so much easier to recommend to others than to remind myself of. Where is the love? That’s a question I keep asking myself as I listen to and watch media.
In a household where I am the only college-educated person and the only one who doesn’t vote Republican, I often feel alienated at home. But I find solace in the family I’ve created on campus — my found family, and peers who help me remember to take care of myself, who remind me that my feelings of shame aren’t rational. Though not rational, those feelings can be crippling. Conversations about future fatigue only grow louder with the uncertainty of what home will look like in a few years, or even in two. Having the opportunity to discuss and experience the production of The Laramie Project gave me a perspective and deeper understanding I wish I had acquired sooner. It may have eased some of the sinking feelings I’ve long held about the alienation and violence that queer people face. The death of Matthew Shepard, your murder, and the countless other young lives that never had the chance to grow old weigh heavily on me. It’s a sorrow that’s difficult to express lives lost before they had a chance to age, or to experience the beauty of a life lived fully. I find myself deeply saddened by this. There’s a pervasive disdain for complexity, for difference a clinging to hegemonic and binary stereotypes. Even within the trans community, the concept of “passing” can imply that a trans person who doesn’t fit neatly into one gender or another is somehow less valid. Their authenticity is often questioned, and their struggles are not seen as meaningful as those of someone who "passes" as a binary gender.
The burnout that accumulates in the pursuit of gender-affirming care, alongside the frustration and emotional toll of transitioning, can stretch far into the process. Future Fatigue describes gender-affirming care as a "lifeor-death step to achieving happiness," but that narrow focus fails to reflect the full diversity of trans experiences and communities. There are curated, binary expectations of trans people that cause ripples of harm, shaping damaging portrayals in the media and politics. The intense, invasive media coverage of trans issues feeds a heteronormative culture of transphobia, making assumptions about our lives and experiences that only deepen the shame many of us feel for simply existing. "You can be anything you want." These words ring throughout childhood and adolescence, filled with a promise of endless potential. But, over time, that wonder is discouraged, and curiosity is stifled. As Future Fatigue points out, “The dystopic visions they offer resist the tendency to link joyful effect to a futural hope.” The creativity and intimacy that bloom within a trans person’s transition are often ignored, overshadowed by the complexities and ongoing nature of transformation. How much speculation about trans lives must be made to satisfy the cis and hetero gaze? How long will it take before they feel we’ve been reprimanded enough for simply living our truth?
We fear the erasure of queer subculture and the violence directed at our community. As an older gay person, I struggle to foresee a hopeful future. The intense violence you endured, the degradation and dehumanization forced upon you in your final moments, makes my stomach sink. In my lifetime, I promise you there will be justice for you. You will be remembered, thought of, and honored long after I am gone. Your life, your fight, and your existence are proof of trans joy. Thank you, Sam, for leaving behind a legacy of trans joy that people like me can look to when we need reassurance that we are valued. With gratitude, Mr. Marie
