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senoyreve's review
challenging
dark
emotional
funny
hopeful
informative
medium-paced
5.0
i think this book provides such insight into a mind that is often portrayed but never explored. trans women have been portrayed in many ways often not positive. but what even the best representations
lack is a true exploration of the mind of someone who is changing the entirety of their existence. in tgsm the author lays her mind and body bare for the reader; she hides none of her fears or insecurities relating to her transition. it brought me to understandings about the ideas of traness that i had never even considered.
lack is a true exploration of the mind of someone who is changing the entirety of their existence. in tgsm the author lays her mind and body bare for the reader; she hides none of her fears or insecurities relating to her transition. it brought me to understandings about the ideas of traness that i had never even considered.
ejkimberley's review
5.0
A phenomenal ride, capturing so much of the trans experience with just the right combination of insight and humour. A sort of trans Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, with ketamine as the intoxicant of choice. My favourite trans read so far this year.
reibureibu's review
funny
hopeful
informative
lighthearted
reflective
fast-paced
5.0
So disillusioned am I with white trans women that I see the rare non-delusional non-self-absorbed (or, at least, not so self-absorbed as to have that impede any actual justice work) and I immediately think she deserves pussy. Maybe she does.
I have gripes with certain takes expressed in here, but Hannah Baer is a white trans woman who probably deserves pussy. Her perspective on transness is, to be expected from one who is white and comes from money, somewhat circumscribed by her background and I feel (at time of publication) she lacks awareness of how something like race affects, intersects, assembles, entwines with gendersexuality. I noticed this most in her sections on non-binary identity (not always a transness) and higher education, where she seems to inscribe non-binariness to an SJW caricature in the former and frequently lambasts herself as overeducated and higher education as lambastable in the latter.
People who are not white tend to have complicated relationships to these things. People who are not white tend to have complicated relationships with many things. I'm not going to get into the weeds of it here, but it is itself a sign of lambastable higher education when a higher-educated white person indiscriminately lambasts higher education—something I'm sure Baer herself would agree. Theory, academia, higher education in general, these are things that can and do allow for poc without the language to describe their experiences, their subjugations, their resistances, their complications, to do so. It's not an uncommon topic I hear from other poc; certainly it was the gateway for me. When highly educated white people blanket criticize their higher education, I can't help but think that they really have no idea what it's like to be non-white in white hegemony; which, yes, is kind of so obvious as to not need explained, but rarely is there any actual work done towards radical empathy.
Also, people who are not white are inherently trans'd (in non-/binary ways) by white hegemony. I don't really feel like educating on this because it's a lot of work to lay it out in a way those who don't already understand this can understand, but DM me or something if you really wanna know.
Anyways, I'm not accusing Baer of being a horrible hypocritical white racist, that is absurd. But I do think it's necessary to explicitly complicate seemingly-radical convictions especially when they come from the normative state citizen (in this case, the transnormative subject). Trans Girl Suicide Museum is one of my favorite things I've ever read, but I feel I must address the (obviously) unintentionally-imperialist maxim that resembles a liberatory transgression because white trans girls are going to read the shit that other white trans girls say and write (and *not* read things from trans girls of color) and take it as truth because they're funny and hot and internet-famous or something. I find it is especially the case with white trans women in particular, because in this specific configuration to shed male privilege often unconsciously works to reattain that lost privilege vis-a-vis leveraging their "new" trans + femme marginalization—effectually, wielding white power. If white femboys have a penchant to become outright nazis, white tgirls have one to become neoliberals (much more than they'd think).
Baer is pretty decent with this though. She checks her white privilege solidly enough to make sure she doesn't become *that* annoying white trans girl (I mean, she *is* very much an annoying white trans girl, but like, in a "you pass the vibe check" I-wanna-hang-out-with-her-and-trust-enough-that-she-won't-be-weird-about-race kinda way). I only take measures to scrutinize these two things because that is just what has to be done in order to not normalize white "agnosticism."
I am reminded of a great passage regarding sexism from Sara Ahmed:
I have gripes with certain takes expressed in here, but Hannah Baer is a white trans woman who probably deserves pussy. Her perspective on transness is, to be expected from one who is white and comes from money, somewhat circumscribed by her background and I feel (at time of publication) she lacks awareness of how something like race affects, intersects, assembles, entwines with gendersexuality. I noticed this most in her sections on non-binary identity (not always a transness) and higher education, where she seems to inscribe non-binariness to an SJW caricature in the former and frequently lambasts herself as overeducated and higher education as lambastable in the latter.
People who are not white tend to have complicated relationships to these things. People who are not white tend to have complicated relationships with many things. I'm not going to get into the weeds of it here, but it is itself a sign of lambastable higher education when a higher-educated white person indiscriminately lambasts higher education—something I'm sure Baer herself would agree. Theory, academia, higher education in general, these are things that can and do allow for poc without the language to describe their experiences, their subjugations, their resistances, their complications, to do so. It's not an uncommon topic I hear from other poc; certainly it was the gateway for me. When highly educated white people blanket criticize their higher education, I can't help but think that they really have no idea what it's like to be non-white in white hegemony; which, yes, is kind of so obvious as to not need explained, but rarely is there any actual work done towards radical empathy.
Also, people who are not white are inherently trans'd (in non-/binary ways) by white hegemony. I don't really feel like educating on this because it's a lot of work to lay it out in a way those who don't already understand this can understand, but DM me or something if you really wanna know.
Anyways, I'm not accusing Baer of being a horrible hypocritical white racist, that is absurd. But I do think it's necessary to explicitly complicate seemingly-radical convictions especially when they come from the normative state citizen (in this case, the transnormative subject). Trans Girl Suicide Museum is one of my favorite things I've ever read, but I feel I must address the (obviously) unintentionally-imperialist maxim that resembles a liberatory transgression because white trans girls are going to read the shit that other white trans girls say and write (and *not* read things from trans girls of color) and take it as truth because they're funny and hot and internet-famous or something. I find it is especially the case with white trans women in particular, because in this specific configuration to shed male privilege often unconsciously works to reattain that lost privilege vis-a-vis leveraging their "new" trans + femme marginalization—effectually, wielding white power. If white femboys have a penchant to become outright nazis, white tgirls have one to become neoliberals (much more than they'd think).
Baer is pretty decent with this though. She checks her white privilege solidly enough to make sure she doesn't become *that* annoying white trans girl (I mean, she *is* very much an annoying white trans girl, but like, in a "you pass the vibe check" I-wanna-hang-out-with-her-and-trust-enough-that-she-won't-be-weird-about-race kinda way). I only take measures to scrutinize these two things because that is just what has to be done in order to not normalize white "agnosticism."
I am reminded of a great passage regarding sexism from Sara Ahmed:
We find that: once the pressure to modify the shape of disciplines is withdrawn they ‘spring back’ very quickly into that old shape. Feminists have to keep pushing otherwise things quickly reverse to how they were before. The history of the ‘spring back’ mechanism is impossible to separate from the history of feminist exhaustion. Which is to say: the very necessity of having to push for some things to be possible can be what makes them (eventually) impossible. Something might not come about not because we have been prevented from doing something (we might even have been officially encouraged to do something) but when the effort to make that thing come about is too much to sustain.
What I am implying here is that sexism might drop out of the feminist vocabulary not because of our success in transforming disciplines but because of the exhaustion of having to keep struggling to transform disciplines. It might be because of sexism that we do not attend to sexism. We lose the word; keep the thing.
Just as with sexism, racism (imperialism, neo-/colonialism, etc.) is the default that must actively, constantly, be pushed back against even if it is exhaustive work. Just as what Baer is doing against transmisogyny.
roe_'s review
Went from rolling my eyes at the focus on ketamine and Everyday Feminism, to feeling quite touched and warmed by a lot of the personal anecdotes in here. I'm new to the "autofiction" genre in general so wasn't entirely sure what to expect. I feel like I'd have to take some of the theory discussed here with a pinch of salt (it doesn't always come across as the most informed perspective) but it feels like a conversation with a friend, in a good way.
taybot's review
dark
emotional
sad
tense
fast-paced
2.5
It's an autobiography about fighting gender dysphoria with ketamine. I could see it being helpful for some, but it wasn't for me
Content Warnings
Graphic: Drug abuse, Transphobia, and Self harm