Welcome to Our Trans Experience Special Issue

Introducing Brevity’s latest special issue, which also happens to be its 75th, featuring brilliant new writing by Lee Anderson, Nic Anstett, Kay Ulanday Barrett, KB Brookins, Rivka Clifton, Mac Crane, Atlas Desmond, Melissa Faliveno, Eric LeMay, Katherine Scott Nelson, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore and Ocean Wei. Each piece is accompanied by gorgeous visual work by artist...
Carry Me

Carry Me

There’s a new curve to my hip that wasn’t there before. My stomach is softer than it used to be, my breasts a little bigger. My arms and shoulders are less defined. What once was ridge is gentler slope. I stand in the mirror, posture and pose, hold flesh in my hand, fill it. I...
Flying Still Matters

Flying Still Matters

Growing up playing sports everyone called me Crane. Whether my coaches were screaming at me, barking at me, cursing me under their breath, or praising me, it was Crane this, Crane that. I liked the sound of it in their mouths, reminding me that I was an athlete. To be an athlete, in my eyes,...
Like Nothing Ever Happened

Like Nothing Ever Happened

The thing about a Derek Jarman movie is when you find yourself crying you don’t know why you’re crying, not exactly. It’s the layering of everything. Like the memory of seeing his movies at the Castro Theatre in the early-‘90s when everyone was dying, we were watching or trying not to watch but we were...
Switched On

Switched On

In a Seattle music shop, I fiddled with a synthesizer’s sliders and knobs. It took only a few minutes for me to corrupt the pulsing square waveform into something completely unlistenable. I turned the volume down and pretended to toggle through the menus. After starting HRT, my orgasms changed—long, body-shaking, and mind-erasing. But they didn’t...
Bad Girl

Bad Girl

I want to grow up and be good. I wake up, go to the gym, and eat breakfast, just like I’m supposed to. But I question things more than I should. I count the dresses mother has bought me, their number adding up to the number of things I can’t wait to throw away. I...
From Scratch

From Scratch

On our first date, we ditch the Greek formal to make pasta. No one notices our absence. During the half-mile walk back to her fraternity house, Emily tells me she’s developed her own sauce recipe while I toddle alongside her in the high heels I’d never properly learned how to walk in. By the time...
Partition

Partition

The customer pulls away the thin changing room curtain and emerges with her bright blue, almost neon, bra exposed. She asks me why the faded denim jacket won’t close across her chest, but I am no longer there. I am in the red scrape of razor burn on my neck and chin, the too-deep almost-butch...
“Taste Test!”

“Taste Test!”

I am heading up the stairs, carrying a tray with three tubs of sherbet and as many spoons. In a week, on International Transgender Day of Visibility, I will tell the world I’m nonbinary—the world, in this case, being my 658 followers on Twitter—but right now I’m about to tell the person I love most....
Puddle Jumper (excerpt)

Puddle Jumper (excerpt)

My family isn’t here to go to medical appointments with me or talk me through my symptoms or make strange jokes about body parts to ease the tension. They aren’t in another zip code or even across the globe. After every surgery in my adult life, there was no hastened, helpful, overprotective mom or tita...
Maternity as a Country

Maternity as a Country

Ada, It’s me again, it’s you again, it’s us. We are lying on the mint bedsheets, thinking about her again. We wonder if she will appear in our dream again. Not a past lover, not even our mother, but someone in the future, a child. It’s probably pretty weird to be a twenty-one year old...
Driving Home from the Kink Club

Driving Home from the Kink Club

I am 20 years old, driving home from getting my ass kicked, blasting my music and sobbing in a way where the tears don’t blur my vision but do drip down my face, and I can feel the soreness waking up in my knees, my thighs, my abs, and my shirt sticks to my skin...
after creating change

after creating change

after the daylong trans institute after 300 people crammed in a room that seats 90 after the listening panel feedback session where folks hurl love & rage & are talked over & disrespected after the trans & disabled caucus asks the lesbian caucus to keep it down so we can hear each other & they...

Why Trans Flash?

I want trans people to take up space. I want to take up space. When I was ten years old my parents sat me down to tell me my professional basketball dreams were not practical due to my size, and that was before transition. I am 5’5 and scrawny no matter what I eat or...

Against Being Good

I have been trying, for several years, to write about friendship—particularly friendship between adult men and the ways that it’s complicated, for me, as a transgender man who didn’t come out until his early twenties. For the same several years, I have failed miserably at writing this essay. I couldn’t figure out why. It felt...