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...
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
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
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
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!”
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)
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
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...
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...
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